It’s been a minute since I attempted an alphabet series here. Life has a habit of doing what life does—tangling the lines, shifting the ground beneath our feet, and demanding our full attention elsewhere. For a long time, the alphabet stopped at G, and frankly, that felt appropriate. Some letters just take up more room than others.
But hiding from the keyboard doesn’t change the scenery. So today, we start fresh. We start at the beginning.
A is for Anxiety.
We tend to talk about anxiety as if it’s just a feeling of worry, but anyone who has lived with it knows it’s physical. It’s a heavy fog that settles over your desk. It’s the tight spot in your chest that tells you everything is urgent, yet somehow makes your hands feel entirely too heavy to pick up a pen.
When you’re trying to build something new—whether that’s a business, a creative catalog, or just a routine that works—anxiety is the ultimate saboteur. It shows up looking like a mountain of unfinished business and whispers, “If you can’t climb the whole thing today, why bother putting on your shoes?”
It paralyzes us by making the big picture look impossible. It looks at a slow start or a quiet season and labels it a permanent failure.
But over the years, I’ve learned that you can’t argue your way out of anxiety. You can’t sit on the couch and think your way into peace of mind. Anxiety thrives in the thinking; it starves in the doing.
The only real antidote to a mind that’s running a million miles an hour in the wrong direction is a physical, tangible action.
And it doesn’t have to be a mountain-moving action, either.
When the fog is thick, the goal isn’t to figure out the next five years, or even the next five weeks. The goal is just to find the edge of the legal pad. It’s choosing one micro-step that proves to your brain that you are still the one holding the pen.
It’s opening the binder, even if you only read one page.
It’s writing down four bars of a lyric on a scrap piece of paper, even if the rest of the song isn’t there yet.
It’s scheduling one post, clicking one link, or sending one email.
Action breaks the spell. It clears a tiny square inch of space in the fog where you can breathe again. Things might not be moving at the speed you planned, and the horizon might still look uncertain, but a single step means you are no longer standing still.
If you’re sitting in the quiet today wondering how to get back on the wagon—whatever your wagon happens to be—don’t look at the whole road. Just look at the very next inch. Pick up the pen. Write the first word.
We’re starting at A today. And sometimes, just showing up for the first letter is victory enough.
Mothersense and Miscellaneous 