Anxiety

I've thrown my January bridge out into the unknown and I don't know what's happened to it! I have visions of my careful packaging having been crushed, the bridge broken, all that tricky cut-out text pulled apart... I haven't heard yet whether it's arrived, and the problem is compounded by silence. Another fantasy is that it has arrived, but that it has been literally and metaphorically 'shelved' and that the project can't continue, for reasons as yet unknown.

I can feel myself fretting. I'm not good at not knowing things. Of course, there are lots of things I don't know, but most of them I don't care about! I know and care about this thing, and the waiting is agonising because it has to do with more than the vagaries of two postal services; it is also about putting something of yourself out there for someone else to see, someone who doesn't know you or your background or your motivations or your approach to things. And perhaps they won't like it? Perhaps they won't like me? That is the primal fear, the underlying anxiety that takes me straight back to years and years and years of being bullied and taunted and disliked at school. Posting the bridge was a bit like offering myself up to someone to be abused, and waiting to hear a response is a bit like a long flinch. I'm waiting to find out by hard experience whether the outcome will be abuse or acceptance, or - because I'm an adult now and not a child anymore - it is perhaps more about whether there will be longed-for dialogue and connection with someone for whom making art is also an intimate process, or whether blankness and silence will cut the dialogue off before it has really begun.