One difficult Chicago winter several years ago, seasonal depression hit me so hard I didn’t know what was happening. I had gone pescatarian the spring before, avoiding eggs and dairy as well. I had no idea how much Vitamin D was in an egg. For a few months I was really struggling emotionally, and finally sought therapy after I started unintentionally losing weight, which I’d only ever done before when I was depressed.

I tried two different therapists with mixed results. The first ended up being very disorganized and not even in my insurance. But one thing she told me stuck with me. She said I was experiencing ‘anticipatory anxiety.’ When I found my next therapist, who I found unhelpful for different reasons, she said that didn’t make sense to her because anxiety in and of itself is already anticipatory.

However, I can now sit here and say that the first therapist was correct. Anticipatory anxiety is totally a thing and my brain apparently loves to grow it when under duress.

Sunrises and sunsets are good for appreciating the moment.

I’ve always been someone who naturally looks forward. I plan things. I set schedules. I enjoy spreadsheets. The downside of this is that it’s taken me a lot of work to make myself slow down and appreciate the moment that I’m experiencing. I am getting noticeably better at this as I get older. It’s also much easier to appreciate the moment when you are fairly certain that your immediate future is stable.

As many of you know, I’ve been writing furiously this year. I’ve been writing for several years, but this year my quality and output have both increased notably. I decided it was time to take the next step and start pitching to agents. I chose a pitch event that a friend had had a good experience with at my goal and started making revisions after several productive beta meetings.

Post revisions, with the first draft of the sequel already done, I decided it was time to bite the bullet, and signed up. I scheduled my betas for the revised version and set up three read feedback discussions with different groups to take place two weeks before the event.

“Perfect,” I thought. “I’ll have two weeks to do any tweaking before I pitch and get excited about the book again.”

Then, last week, during a normal meeting of my writers group, discussion of my sequel came up, and I fell apart. After some dissecting, I realized that I was worried about my feedback sessions and the pitching event to come. More specifically, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle the feedback sessions, that my passion and confidence would tank, and that I’d go into the pitches with no drive or energy and thus doom the entire work to failure.

TLDR? I was scared—to the point of tears—of the feelings that I might have after a future event and how those feelings might affect my subsequent feelings and behaviors for an event two weeks after the one I was already freaking out about.

I think that’s anticipatory anxiety at its finest.

Now, this isn’t about rejection. I was an actor in Chicago for nearly two decades, I eat rejection for breakfast. My fear was that I wouldn’t do my best at this event because of the feelings that I might have beforehand. I had been through a tough feedback session with a previous work and it had killed my passion (temporarily) for that project to the point where I had to take a break from it for a while. I was worried this would happen to me again, although the work that I’m pitching is in a much different place than the previous one was.

I was putting myself through the feels well in advance of the feels.

It’s difficult to put yourself out there, I know this, I’ve put my creative self ‘out there’ in many different ways over the years, and one thing I know is that the first time is always the worst. You can prepare in many different ways and it will still be difficult and scary. Not a reason not to do it.

One friend offered me some fantastic advice, that I will impart to you now, in the event that your brain is wired in a similar way. Since I was already planning on experiencing tough feelings, why not plan how I was going to deal with it?

So I’m going in expecting to get hit with something I didn’t anticipate. I’ll expect to have hard emotions. And I’ll allow myself two days off to wallow in it completely. To feel sad, to feel like a failure, to feel like I should tear it all up and throw it in the trash.

After those two days, I’ll get back to work. Because I’ve been through this before. I’ve had tough feedback and I’ve felt the feels. Usually it takes me a day to see clearly again, if the feedback was really tough, it sometimes takes two. Regardless, I have always bounced back before. I will bounce back this time.

And I’m going to keep that trick in my back pocket for the future. So much better to go through the hard feelings than to let fear prevent you from doing the things you want to do, but why go through the hard feelings before and after you actually feel them?

Anticipatory Anxiety in a creative