I figured it was time for another quick update. Both on writing for NaNoWriMo and on life in general. I’m tired and a bit overworked lately, so this’ll be a short one. I’m just here to let everyone know what’s up and what’s been happening.
For starters, I’m doing well on writing my word count. I do feel like I’m a lot less happy with this year’s story, but there are some good things here and there that’ll allow me to polish it on a rewrite. With the first volume I spent a lot of time establishing the characters and the direct surroundings. I had both the Ravadier peninsula and Milinia pretty well thought out, but the rest of the world was still a mystery to me. I knew kingdoms had to circle a dangerous area called the Feral Wildlands and that Blueyerd wasn’t on great terms with their neighbors. But that was really the extent of that. So this volume has been a lot of worldbuilding and figuring out places and characters. I think I’ve done a decent job, and it allows me to go back for a final edit on volume 1 where I can add in some spice that is currently missing from the draft. As of posting this, I’m at a little over 46.000 words written. That leaves me with 4.000 words in 5 days. And whatever I can muster up this evening, which probably won’t be a lot.
That brings me to the next part, how I’m doing. I got a bit of a rough week behind me. I took on too many things and my brain kind of overloaded on Monday. After getting a panic attack I had to go straight into teaching class, which was definitely a new experience. After teaching I went home and stayed home for the next three days. I’m doing a bit better now, but I’m still very tired. I’ll try to take things a little bit slow next month. I love writing, but I have been up until 11, 12 in the evening finishing up on writing, instead of going to bed early and watching youtube or something. I’m also behind on what I want to watch. Hopefully things go well the next few weeks and I don’t have to stay home sick another week. We’ll see. I have big plans for next year when it comes to writing, but I am taking it slow until New Year’s. Both to get some rest and to build up a bit of a library of posts. Either way, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all next week again for more Bleach.
Good morning, afternoon and evening everyone. I got to sleep in late today because I finished all of my uni stuff yesterday and now have the entire day off. Isn’t that great? I needed a small break so this works out pretty well. I’ll tell you what, teaching several days a week on top of a job and going to uni is pretty tough. Adding 50.000 words of writing to that mix is definitely overkill. I can keep this up for a month for sure, and we’ll get into that a little bit, but my plan of writing 500.000 words in a year might have to wait until after I graduate. We’ll see, I’ve done dumber things before.
Let’s get into that then. As of posting this, I’ve written a little over 11 chapters of The Hesitant Hero volume 2. To put that into a word count, that’s 22908 words in the span of 10 days or roughly 2290 words a day. I’ve written at least 2000 words every single day so far. Wow. Sometimes I surprise myself. I’ve written a ton of new characters into this series as well as many new locations in the span of the first ten chapters. I am worried about the editing phase of this story, because I need to really sit down and do some proper worldbuilding. I have a rough view of what everything looks like for sure, but I make up names of people and places on the spot and then I often have to search for them when I need them later. I wonder how other authors deal with this. I have picked up a bit of a habit after reading Name of the Wind for naming some of my characters. A few of Rothfuss’ characters are similar to regular names but a little bit changed. Or at least a little bit different from names that I’m used to. Think of Simmon instead of Simon or Wilem instead of Willem. I’ve introduced a character named Selvia, to just name an example. Cut me off if I’m being boring.
I’m pretty pleased with myself if you haven’t noticed. The gang is currently in the process of leaving the capital city after possibly getting a lead about the disappearance of the crown prince. I needed this large amount of information about the world for the story to continue feeling alive. I left a lot of worldbuilding shallow in the first volume because I wanted to focus on the journey. Sure, Cobal knew a lot about the world, but Mana and Kimi both didn’t know a lot, so keeping the reader kind of close to where the story takes place felt like a good decision. Now that the world is opening up for everyone and they’re spending time in the largest city of the kingdom, it only makes sense for them to meet a lot more people.
Anyway, I’ve been having fun writing this story although it definitely is a challenge. I’m going to go buy some lunch and then try to get my 2000 words done for the day. More posts coming next week, thank you all for your patience and those of you who are also doing this challenge, please let me know in the comments how it’s going.
Good evening folks. I’ll be keeping it short and sweet today, since I’ve got to take all the time I have left to mentally prepare for this month of writing way too many words. For those unfamiliar with the concept; NaNoWriMo is a yearly challenge where writers challenge themselves to try and write 50.000 words of a novel or something else in one month. The core idea is to just keep writing without constantly going back to edit what you’ve already written. I’m historically awful at continuing writing a story, but last year I managed to write a pretty solid draft version of the first volume of The Hesitant Hero. This year I’m hoping to do a second volume in the month of November, or at least the first 50.000 words of a draft. That’s probably going to be an even harder challenge, but I’m ready.
What does this mean for this blog? Not terribly much. Posts have slowed down a little bit during October and this was partially so I could prepare for November. My goal is to post 2 to 3 times a week still. The bleach recap continues every week although don’t be too surprised if there’s a day of delay, seeing as my Tuesdays are pretty swamped already without also writing a blogpost and a whole chapter of a story. I’ve got a few posts lined up that I prepared ahead of time, so this shouldn’t be a huge issue.
And then we’ll soon b at the home stretch. I’ve been working on a new schedule that fits better for next year, but I’ll talk about that when the time is right. Until then, check back here for regular updates on my progress and if all goes well (that’s a big if, I’m aware) The Hesitant Hero should return early next year. Are you excited? I’m excited. And stressed. I’m always stressed. Wish me luck and thanks for reading.
Let’s go back to 2007. Kanye West releases his third studio album; Graduation. In case you’re not super familiar with his music, this is the album that has songs like; Stronger, Good Morning, Homecoming, and Good Life (Featuring T-Pain). All of these songs are fantastic, and this era of Hip-Hop music is one of my favorites alongside the days when Tupac was still making music. Kanye’s voice was unique and his beats were straight fire. The song Good Morning is still regularly stuck in my head almost 15 years later. In 2008 the album 808s and and Heartbreaks released, which also has several songs on it that I still listen to somewhat regularly. All of this makes it such a sad time right now.
Kanye West’s Graduation album
For those of you who don’t consume the news at all, how I wish I were you, Kanye West has been in the news over the past few months for his White Lives Matter clothing as well as his extreme anti-semetic comments and rhetoric. As a result of this he’s been dropped by his big sponsor Adidas and has been getting more and more unhinged. Now I don’t want to spend too much time lingering on Kanye’s personal situation. I think he’s saying horrendous things that even mental illness doesn’t excuse. I’m not a psychologist but he seems unwell and I hope he gets proper help. But people who are mentally unwell should still be held responsible for the things they say and do. It’s not an all-encompassing shield that you just deploy when you want to say some racist shit.
What I do want to talk about a little bit is a topic I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. I actually wrote a post about this earlier in the year but ended up deleting it because it wasn’t really all that good. I want to talk a little bit about separating the art from the artist. Because there have been several artists whose music I really enjoyed that turned out to be bad people on different levels. And it’s got me thinking a lot if it’s still okay to listen to their music. I still remember when the documentary about Michael Jackson came out and everyone was canceling his music. Now I don’t listen to Michael Jackson super often, but I do go through phases where I’ll listen to his music religiously. I do this with many artists, especially older music like Phil Collins and Elton John. Now putting aside this documentary, which I didn’t see and should never be evidence against a person. I don’t know what the man did and did not do. I know he was never declared guilty and I like to believe in innocence until proven guilty. So I still listen to Michael Jackson.
But not everyone’s bad deeds are equally clear and unclear, and this next person’s story has a lot more of a conclusive conclusion. I’m talking about the worlds greatest, the man who believes he can fly and who, unfortunately, wasn’t able to keep it all in his pants. I’m talking about R. Kelly. I used to put World’s greatest by R. Kelly on repeat when I felt sad. There were many songs I used for that, but I love his voice and I went through a massive R&B phase. That’s when I went to a Ne-Yo concert and learned that I’m way too autistic for a crowd of that size. But now we know that R. Kelly was a pretty shitty person. And as much I am a proponent of separating the art from the artist, I can’t listen to the song the same. The same thing is true for Chris Brown. Insanely talented, but beating up women isn’t something I like to see out of my favorite artists. I guess I’m not enough of a Top G to support that kind of stuff.
And that brings us back to Kanye, or Ye as he’s called these days. To complicate things, this debacle isn’t just something that happened in the past either. This is happening right now. It’s so disappointing to watch. I’m fine with artists being a bit out of touch. I don’t care that Jay-Z sounds and reasons like a billionaire now, I don’t even care that Taylor Swift flies around the globe every other day. Well, I do care, but I have no problem separating these actions from the music they make. With the things happening with Kanye that feels more difficult to me. I listened to Good Morning and Homecoming yesterday and they’re still fantastic songs. But it feels a bit weirder now.
I think if I were to conclude this I’d say I don’t have the perfect answer. Every situation is different. I do think people should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want to consume the art of people they don’t support. I’ve seen people judge others on still listening to Michael Jackson or Chris Brown and the same will likely happen with Kanye West. But we have to take a step back and realize how important music is for people. I listened to a live performance by Linkin Park yesterday and I still tear up every time I listen to those incredible vocals. If it came out that Mike Shinoda actively supported NFTs and didn’t realize it’s all a massive scam I’d probably still want to listen to numb every now and then. (Sorry Mike, you’re catching strays here but I still love your music). Music and art in general can be very important to the people around us, and dealing with the fact that artists are also human can be tricky. So let’s all take a step back, listen to some old Kanye West songs, and put that positive energy back in the air. Maybe things will change for the better. Thanks for reading.
It’s the fall holiday right now and it’s officially been about 2 months since I started my (hopefully) final internship as a teacher. I’ve started properly teaching at this point and I’m getting decently used to my new environment. Which is good because the first essays and exams are getting awfully close. Early November I’m going to be quite busy and I hope to pass some of my assignments in one go for a change. It’s been a little while since I’ve done uni classes and it’s been even longer since I’ve done them with success. Covid’s really thrown a wrench in a lot of my plans. At least I managed to do a lot of writing in the meantime so not all that time is lost.
So let’s talk a little bit about exhaustion. I don’t think I’ve talked about it much here, but my dad has been struggling with bad sleep for the past few years. He went in for a shoulder surgery a few years back, thinking that this was the source of why he couldn’t sleep. He was in quite a lot of pain from his shoulder and they had to cut through it and anchor it to the bone. That all healed wonderfully but he still wasn’t sleeping. Then he went in for tests and got a sleep apnea machine. This fixed his apnea at night, which I learned during all of that is something you can actively monitor to see if it’s getting better or worse. He still wasn’t sleeping though. Several attempts later, he finally settled on medication against restless legs and he’s now sleeping a bit better than before. He’s roughly sleeping as well as I am, which is almost kind of funny, because for him that’s now a good amount compared to before where I am still exhausted from the same amount of sleep.
The thing I want to highlight is that many people have to deal with exhaustion for many different reasons. People burnout at work all the time and exhaustion can play a big role in that. If you have no energy to do the fun things in life, eventually it saps all motivation out of you and you can’t be bothered to do the necessary things either. Now obviously when it gets to the first stage it should already be a major red flag. We shouldn’t live to work, but work to live instead. If you can’t find the energy for joyous things, something is going wrong. But I’ve recently been feeling this exhaustion pretty badly. August and September were my weakest months when it came to writing as well. Not that they were bad months, I still got in over 25.000 words each month which by my standards is impressive. But I was definitely feeling the exhaustion. October has so far been good and with NaNoWriMo coming up, which I’ll talk a little bit more about next week, I’m well on track for a great year of writing. One of my long term goals is to write 1.000.000 words in a single year. This is still very far out, even doing half of that is going to take a lot of willpower and effort. To give a comparison, last year I wrote around 270.000 and this year I seem to be beating that by about 100.000 if all goes well. If I can write 500.000 words in 2023 that would be a major success.
That brings me to trying. I’m someone who is uncomfortable and anxious all the time. But I keep trying. Why, sometimes I do not know. All I know is that I’m not happy when I stop trying and if I keep trying I might arrive somewhere better. I’m a pessimist at heart and I’m well aware of this. I’ve been trying for years to be more positive and it works pretty well these days, but it is still something I need to actively try at. I’m trying my best to be a good teacher, I’m trying my best to pass my classes and I’m trying my best to write more stories. I’ve been getting a lot of good ideas lately but I don’t have the time and energy to put them all down on paper. It’s unfortunate, but I’ll get there soon enough. Hopefully.
Anyway, that’s kind of all I have to say. I’m working hard on preparing for November, so that I can still post two or three times a week even while I’m focusing on the second volume of The Hesitant Hero. After that’s more or less done, I should really face the truth and start editing the first volume. It would be pretty bad if I get started on the third one and still haven’t finished the first one properly. That way I’ll never ever get published. Either way that’s still a long way away, but I do want to get there eventually. Until I get there, I guess I’ll have to just keep trying my best. Thanks for reading.
I have a lot to say about the Hesitant Hero. Some of which I’ve already said, most of which I’ll probably talk about twelve more times before I finally realize no one else is interested in this information. As a teacher, I’ve learned that reflecting on the work you’ve done is crucial in growing, so that’s what I want to do. Whenever I think something about the work I’ve done I’ll just put it in a post like this. Today I want to talk a little bit more about the rough ideas I had for this story and how I wanted to put this into practice.
Let’s start with the perspective for this story. I’ve attempted writing two stories in this world so far, one of which was more of a test run for me that didn’t end up being as good as I would have liked. The core difference was that the first story was done from the perspective of the person who came to the new world. It didn’t feel quite right for Mana’s story though. I wanted to try my hand at writing a story from the perspective of someone else. I wanted to try and emulate the helplessness of having someone around you who is anxious and stressed while not knowing what to do about it. That’s how I eventually ended up with Cobal as the narrator of the story. I did notice at times that I wrote scenes where I included Mana’s thought and I had to stop myself from doing so.
So now we have the core for a story. Cobal has to deal with a hesitant hero. He struggles with the duality of making her become a hero yet also, especially as time goes on and they spend time in the Liriath Forest, as a friend of sorts. They definitely grow closer as he understands her more, and she realizes that Cobal is not an enemy. I look back on writing this story wondering if I portrayed that growth in their relationship properly. Knowing they’d become friends as the story went on made it kind of difficult at times to write their more harsh interactions. Before I submit this story to some agent or publisher or however that works, I still need to read those again and see if I portrayed it all the correct way. It turns out writing a good story takes a lot of time and effort.
I’d also like to talk about some of the other characters. Mainly Kimi and Cassandra. I wanted to have two very different ways of life represented. Kimi, as a spirit, is entwined in magic, and the fantastical elements of the world. Cassandra, although aware that magic exists and interested in it to a degree, is much more practical. I wanted her to see magic as a stepping stool for her inventions. If magic could solve a problem that her inventions lacked, it could be used as a tool like any other. I’m hoping to bring that duality back and they might even team up together. I definitely have some plans for either character which is good because I sure didn’t have any plans for them when I started out this story.
That’s another thing I still am quite proud of. A year ago, as of writing this, all I had for this story was a failed page or two and a concept. I knew I wanted Mana to be reserved and Might’s situation to be clear to her. I also knew I wanted Cobal to be a little bit arrogant at first, but not so much that he’s not likable from the start. I have another series I’m working on where I want to write a lot more complex and often unlikable characters, but I want this to be a fun series. There’ll absolutely be conflict, but I’m writing this as an outlet to relax as well, so as of now I don’t want anything to go too wrong. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll repeat half of this the next time I talk about this series so don’t remember it too hard okay? Thanks for reading, hope to see you all here again for a new post after the weekend.
Oh boy it’s finally time, isn’t it? I’m turning 30 today. For some reason we feel like we’re going to live forever when we’re young and then before we really realize it our 20s are over and we’re supposed to be adults. I think I took a wrong path somewhere in life because I don’t feel like an adult. I still live with my dad, I’m still in school and I don’t feel like I’ve made a life for myself yet. Then again, it’s not a race so what do I care?
When I was young, I had so many dreams and goals. I wanted to be a published writer by 20 and be rich by 30, spending my days in a nice house writing stories. I wanted to have a degree at uni and be happy. I’ve not quite reached any of my goals, have I? That’s something we all need to face from time to time. We can’t always reach our goals in the time we set for ourselves. That’s why we adjust. We’re very good at adjusting ourselves to the things that come our way, aren’t we. When I first set all of these goals for myself, I thought I just had a bit of untreated anxiety. I didn’t know I was on the autism spectrum. I only found out about that when I was 19 years old. That’s now over 10 years ago, that’s pretty crazy too. The thing I look back on the most for my 20s though, is my progress. My starting point was pretty abysmal. I was depressed, had severe anxiety and didn’t leave the house much. I wasn’t doing well at school, didn’t have a job, and had no plan for the future. It took a long time for me to really get somewhere, but I now have a job, a degree while working on a second degree and I have concrete plans to make it out in the big world. I think it’s important to not compare ourselves to other people as much. It’s not a race, it’s not a competition and what is normal for other people might not be normal for us. So I guess this serves a reminder. Both to myself and to you. The way the world works is not how the world has to works and we don’t owe society an explanation for the way we live our life.
Now then, with that out of the way, let’s have a look forward. There’s things I want to do in my thirties. I finished the draft of my first real story this year. I want to have it published in my thirties. I no longer want to get super rich off of writing. I just want to write as much as I can while living a happy life. I want to read more and write more than I did in the past 10 years. I used to write and read a ton when I was young, but poor mental health and a sheer lack of focus has whittled that away and now I do it way less. Even though both are important to me.
I want to get my degree, hopefully before 2024 is over. That’s still a little while away but not that much. I want to carve out a place in this world to call my own.
As for this blog, I’m not sure yet. In the two years I’ve been blogging now I’ve learned a lot. I’m starting to know what I like, what I don’t like and what are realistic goals. With NaNoWriMo around the corner it’s going to be a very busy time. I’m hoping to stick to roughly 3 posts a week for a while. I’m working on far too many stories at once and I doubt I’ll complete half of them in the time I want to. For now, I’ll just keep writing more and more until I write so much that I’ll be declared insane. That sounds like a pretty good goal for my 30s, does it not? As always, thanks for reading!
The other day when I was at work, I was listening to the Trash Taste podcast. For those unfamiliar, this is a podcast with three guys who all moved to Japan to make content there. They got their start in anime youtube and eventually branched out. I was one of the people who expected their podcast to be about anime, but instead got a more general podcast. I think that ended up being better than what it would have been if it was just about anime so I’m not complaining. The reason I’m talking about it today is because they had a discussion about music.
To be more specific, they talked about live recordings versus studio recordings. I’ve gone to one concert in my entire life. It was a Ne-Yo concert. For those unfamiliar, Ne-Yo is a fantastic R&B singer and younger me was obsessed with his music. I’m not listening to him as much these days, but I still love some of his older songs like So Sick, Because of You, Sexy Love & Hate that I love you. That concert experience was absolutely miserable. Sure, his performance was fine, it didn’t blow me away by any means, but it wasn’t bad either. The reason it was miserable for me is because I hate crowds. I wasn’t as painfully aware of that back then because I didn’t know I had autism yet. But it became very clear during the concert. There was way too much going on and I was just on edge the entire time, unable to enjoy the music.
Ever since that day, I haven’t really listened to live music. The podcast I was listening to though, talked about recordings of live music as well. I’ve listened to a ton of those on youtube, and I think it’s nice to hear a live version of a song from time to time, but a vast majority of the time I would say the studio recording of a song is better. They tend to be more polished, because they are, and unless the live performance changes up the song or adds new material, I don’t think I end up enjoying it more than the recorded version.
There is an exception to the rule though. In 2017 Aimer performed live at Budokan. She performed her song, and this is one of my favorite songs of all time, Kataomoi.
Quick aside, there’s some words in foreign languages that just sound nice. An example from Japanese for me would be “kakurenbo” which means hide and seek. It’s the same for me with “Kataomoi” or “unrequited love”. It just sounds beautiful to me and I can’t explain why. I think that Japanese just sounds beautiful in music a lot, which is probably why I’m such a massive fan of J-pop and J-rock.
This live performance of Kataomoi sounds perfect. It sounds the same, if not more emotional than the studio recording. But there’s something wonderful that happens here. The entire crowd claps along with the song in perfect unison. There’s no shouting, there’s no noise, it’s just people clapping to an absolutely perfect song. And although I normally would say the studio recorded version of a song still sounds cleaner, this version of the song gives me chills to a point the original doesn’t. It quickly sent me down the rabbit hole of Aimer’s music and for the last few months her music has dominated my playlists. She’s done music for several great anime as well, including Demon Slayer and Fate Stay Night. I’m currently working on compiling a massive playlist of the best Japanese music I can find so I’ve been going through a lot of music lately. I’ve discovered some great songs recently that I would have never discovered if I’d just stuck to anime openings and endings. Aimer’s recent album; Walpurgis, has some great tracks as well, but I’m also talking about other artists like Hoshino Gen, Creepy Nuts, Coalamode and Kenshi Yonezu. I was just reminded of the Aimer song when I listened to the song at work. It’s a very atmospheric song as well, so it fit with the rainy day we had here. Thanks for reading and please do yourself a favor and check out the live version of Kataomoi here!
So I’m pretty tired right now. Even writing this is taking a lot out of me. It turns out it’s easy to talk about how tired autism can make me when I’m not too busy but once I try to follow some of my own advice and actually jump head first into life it gets a lot more tiring. I’ve just finished my third week of teaching and second week of teaching and uni and work all happening at once. I’m extremely grateful that I at least have my Wednesday and Sunday off because I am completely spent. I need to work tomorrow and I feel like I already have zero energy. Unfortunately this also means that I’m making a lot less progress on some of the stories I’ve been trying to write.
I am taking a break from the Hesitant Hero. I have no real vision on how I’m going to approach editing and proofreading that, but it might take a little while. I’m also still putting two of my other stories on the backburner for a little while as I’m figuring out a schedule now that I’m busier. I hope I feel less busy soon and I probably will. It’s always the first few weeks of getting used to a new schedule that are by far the worst. At least for me it is. I already felt more comfortable interacting and helping students this week than in week one or even two.
Anyway, I’m getting distracted. I was going to talk about what Fridays are going to look like on this blog from now on. I admit it’s been a little bit of a mess in general with the schedule as I’m figuring out what I really want to do. I’ve been enjoying doing my Made in Abyss recaps each week, but now that I have class on Thursday it’s a bit harder to find a good moment to do it. Maybe for the next season of anime I’ll try and take that into account. I’m not sure yet which anime I’m going to cover, I was initially thinking of Bleach but I don’t know yet.
I’ve been skipping Mondays and Wednesdays whenever I don’t have any good content. This week was no different. I hope to keep up with the Bleach recaps but I might skip a week or two. As for the important part, the Fridays, here’s what you can expect:
Not much. Next week I probably won’t have anything to post. I have something planned for the week after that, but then it’ll probably be a bit quieter as I try to figure things out. I am currently working on a story about a character that I want to learn more about, for myself, for another story I’m working on. It’s the same story that my short story Uncovering the tomb of Danahsereth is a prequel for. I don’t think it’s an interesting story, but I might just post it in case someone wants to read it. It’s mainly something I was told once to do for characters. If you write something from their perspective it helps you get into the character more. And I had a fun idea for this character. I’m also still planning to continue The Necromancer’s Daughter one day although I’ve been so focused on Hesitant Hero that I haven’t had the time or energy to edit that story. I have some new ideas for it that I have slowly been collecting in the most chaotic word document you’ll find. Maybe once I get a bit more energy I’ll put the time aside for it.
And Hesitant Hero will return. I have some ideas for the second volume already and I hope to write it in November for NaNoWriMo. If all goes well, chapters for the second volume should be here early 2023. Maybe I’m giving myself too much work and I should focus on one thing at a time. But I wouldn’t be as unhappy as I am if I was good at managing my life, now would I? All of that aside, that’s been me for today, I once again want to thank everyone who read The Hesitant Hero or anything else I’ve posted here. It brings me so much joy to write these stories and if I get my way I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life. Look forward to more content as soon as I feel a bit more energetic. I have some other ideas I won’t talk about yet, but that could be a good fill for the Friday slot on my blog. Thanks for reading!
This week in the series we’re going to take a look at something a bit more small scale, but I found that it’s helped me tremendously throughout the years. A lot of us nervous folks, myself included, sometimes don’t know what to do with themselves. I used to just bounce my legs up and down at a rapid pace as some way to retain focus but as time went on that started bothering people. And rightfully so. If the entire table is shaking while you’re trying to get work done then that’s obviously far from ideal. I talked about fidgeting with one of my students back in special education, because he would get very nervous about small things, which I recognized clearly, and then he didn’t quite know how to handle himself.
When I taught my social skills lesson I hit on this, because during that lesson I was fidgeting as well. As a teacher I’ve found a great trick for it. You can just have a whiteboard marker in your hands at all times and spin it around in your hand as a way to distract yourself. I suggest finding something that makes sense for you to have on you. Alternatively, you could be working at a workplace where everyone is very understanding and then you could get a little bit more creative with your options. Keep in mind that your fidgeting should be as quiet and covert as possible. We don’t want to bother people with noises or lights or things like that. Be conscious of your surroundings and if you’re unsure if something you’re doing is perceived as annoying you could always ask the people around you. Maybe you’re worried about making noise and your coworkers or classmates haven’t noticed you were making a sound at all.
The reason I’m so conscious of my fidgeting comes from being a teacher. For some of our teaching assignments we need to film ourselves as we teach lessons. A lot of people, myself included, already don’t like the sound of our own voices. If you combine that with having to analyze your actions and all that and you’re listening back to this video and keep hearing yourself hum a song to calm down then that’s not a great look. I can look back at it and laugh now, since it was my very first time teaching and I was incredibly nervous about it, but when I heard it back the first time I was mortified my students could hear me hum as well. Since then I’ve kept an eye on it and I don’t really hum during my lessons anymore, but it was a funny way to find out.
So now I just hold on to a whiteboard marker for dear life and everything will be alright. I hope this advice is useful to some of you, but I think for many it might already be something they know about. Next time we do one of these Anxiety Advice posts it’ll likely be a bit of a more serious topic, but I’m quickly typing this out at internship in between data entry stuff that is frying my brain. Let me know if you have any fidgeting advice for me. Maybe you’re a pro at fidget spinner tricks, or you have one of those finger skateboards that were super cool when I was young. Maybe that’s just me showing my age, what’s my age again?
Opal Kaharis 