Reversing Direction
Ten days ago we made a hard business decision. Then I put in the work to release the PDF versions. Then we got emails from people who were just as sad as I was that the defaced version would not see print. And with each email, even the kind ones, my anxiety grew. It kept me up. It ate at me. We’d promised to deliver a thing and were disappointing people with our choice. A Kickstarter is a trust and we were not living up to it. The sick feeling inside sent me into printers quotes and research mode until I was able to present a plan that might let us print both versions of the book and let backers choose which one they wanted. So that is the new plan. It is the right one. It is going to cost us more money and me a lot of time, but at the end of it I will be able to look at both copies of the book knowing I did everything instead of stopping short of everything.
Now if I can just get my anxiety to wind down, that would be nice. It is roaring at me, telling me that I have already failed, that I’m doomed to fail forever. It howls around me making me want to huddle up an hide until the noise goes away. Only the noise tells me all the terrible things that will happen if I hide. Tomorrow I would like to get up and get back to work. I get to make the book I’ve been working hard at. I get to make companion book for it that I didn’t even realize we needed until twelve days ago. I get to put together a presentation. I want to be able to just do that work in peace and happiness and let failure happen (or not happen) somewhere off in the future instead of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy because stupid anxiety won’t let me concentrate today.