Dont Underestimate The Powers of Anxiety.

I've written about this before, or rather the subject of Panic Attacks but I wanted to go further into the extent of Anxiety so that people might realise things and hopefully somehow calm their anxieties before it gets to an overly unhealthy stage.
   I didn't want to do the awful thing and research just how common anxiety is because really there's no need to, it's a lot and we don't need graphs and charts to tell us that. Dealing with it is the important thing, but in order to deal with it you have to realise just how affected YOU personally are.
   The plethora of people affected by anxiety are not all the same, there could be millions of anxiety sufferers and each one has something that makes it a little unique to themselves, so you need to home in on that specific element of anxiety in you. Allow other people to tell you they understand, accept that people will understand and accept their help, but whatever dependency you have on people you still need to kind of sit down and work out what is going to calm things down for you personally.
   Anxiety stretches from losing breath and heart racing to full on physical weakness and pain. Depending how much you're worried about obviously affects what extent you get to, but if you get to the worse stage where you literally feel ill, not just mentally, but physically ill and achey, weak, hurt then that's really when the reins have to be brought in and control has to be taken.
   One of the most overused lines to an anxiety sufferer is "Calm down" sometimes it'll work and sometimes it won't and most of the time you can bat it off as useless, however when you start becoming physically affected "calm down" becomes an order, not a suggestion or a light offering of dialogue. Once physical affects start happening its even harder to cope with, it can come in the form of shakes, pain, headaches etc and stress on top of this starts to put you in a cage, that gets trickier to get out of and eventually reclusiveness can happen.
    No matter how dependent you are, you always need someone at some point so being reclusive is very very self destructive. I guess it's alright me saying "stop when it gets hard" "don't become a recluse" but how do you actually succeed? I find these three things help even a little bit;

1.  Forceful Desensitisation - If your anxiety is connected to something specific, for example a bus and the claustrophobia of a bus then if you feel you can, try and go on buses more often, try to get used to the hustle and bustle and try and lose the entrapment feeling by making it become a regularity. Put buses or whatever the source is in a routine that's happy. If it's transport, go somewhere happy then the mode of transport will be connected in your mind, no longer as a source of anxiety but a means to become happy.
2. Calming Techniques -  Sometimes all it takes is for you to look into ways of calming yourself down, whether its controlling your breathing (often the way to stop anxiety spiralling from the beginning) breathing in a steadied and structured way, where you concentrate on it can often relax you. Also the internet is amazing (with exceptions) and there are tonnes upon tonnes of techniques.
3. Selfishness - Arrogance and general selfishness is one thing I cannot stand, but in terms of anxiety you sometimes need to be more selfish, if your stress is brought on by other people, limit it. Don't limit the amount of times you see them, just try to limit the stress you have for them by telling yourself that YOU will become worse, which will only make things worse for your friend anyway. 

Anxiety is a [take your pick of swearwords] but there are ways of dealing with it. Just find the one thats best for you.

Fantasy; An underestimated genre?

Fantasy is a highly creative, imaginative genre that pushes boundaries of books and films similarly. In comparison to some other concepts/genres of entertainment, fantasy constantly surprises us. More and more people are showing us their ability to en-capture an entire selection of film-buffs and book-lovers with their incredible talent for the extraordinary. Authors such as J.K.Rowling and J.R.R.Tolkien, directors and writers like Steven Moffat, Tim Burton and a whole host of others have given us a means of escapism, a highly marketable selection of films and books and a more open-minded view of the world. The question is, is it underestimated? The power and influence of it, that is. A lot of people are aware of the genre, and possibly too many are a little quick to place it in one specific category, or restrict purely to a young generation. It's probably true that the younger generation and my generation (late-teens) appreciate fantasy more, and are more interested in it, but in no ways can it be specifically and solely for us. One of the best things about fantasy, for me, is that it does give a huge sense of escapism. I'm sure Noel Fielding would agree that it's impossible for us to live our lives and only look at things realistically, and that for happiness, for sanity, and for a bit of fun a little fantasy in our lives is healthy and necessary.

A piece of fantasy that has seriously affected my generation, as we've basically grown up around it and with the characters is Harry Potter, the book series took the world by storm, just as the films did. Wizards, witches, creatures, monsters have been around for ages, years, centuries even in myths and literature, and yet there was something strangely relatable about Harry Potter, which is what I think makes it so popular. Fantasy allows people to take ordinary things in life, and exaggerate them, fantasy itself is a more elaborate version of the word we already live in. Peer Pressure, the existence of strange and unfamiliar people, things. ideas and such have been used as stimuli for films and books such as Harry Potter. Even though that particular series was such a wonderful, fantastically and endlessly interesting one, the idea of going to a new school, new surroundings, nicer parent figures are relatable to a wide audience. Within fantasy, you get hints of reality, essentially its the basis...just made a bit more fun. This is why I think its so underestimated, because a lot of us, I don't think realise the possibilities that come from it, within these great fantasy creations are moral questions, statements etc that not only allow us to escape from whatever problems we have... but in someways give us hope, and allows us to confront them in our own way, in a more bearable way. Lets be honest as well, life is so much more incredible when we believe anything can happen. If you're sad and you see the world and just the world, just plants and people, it's not gonna make anything better, but if you imagine beyond the mundane and the ordinary that there is something larger, something so much more fantastical, how could that not lift your spirits?

I'm gonna wrap this up by saying that the entertainment sector, specifically books and films are underestimated in their powers to makes us feel better anyway but fantasy in particular has such a huge affect on people. Even if you don't realise it, after watching a Fantasy film or reading a fantasy book your mind is more likely to be widened, to be expanded to consider other things....and maybe that gives you room to find the solution you're looking for.

Shorts to Novels: Recovering from the loss.

I will not sugar coat it, when I realised my laptop had died, and there was a possibility that the hard drive could be so fried that I would not be able to recover any documents, it wasn't a pretty sight. I was stressing, I was annoyed, but obviously once the initial shock had subsided I set out to think positively and find alternatives. I searched around for backups of things that I had on there, very very focused on mainly finding the incomplete novel because the idea of re-writing the 14000 words that I'd managed so far was a little scary and upsetting.  But there are hella worse things that could have happened! Nevertheless I had found a backup of the novel on my external hard drive, but it wasn't the most recent, it was although still a copy. Today, my positivity hit the roof and I thought that this could actually be a really good thing, because there were parts of the novel that I was a little unsure about, and not totally happy with, so this gave me a chance to re-create and refresh. My plan today was to go on a long walk to a little park/reservoir/lake thingymajig that I like to go to, looking around finding inspiration and writing ideas now, sentences, phrases etc and luckily what I'm writing now I believe is probably better than what I had. I think the main problem with my story was that I'd given myself quite a short deadline to finish a certain amount of words, so I had started to rush myself in parts which obviously is a shameful and sinful thing for a writer to do! With a more refreshed, quality-focused mind I've been able to write something better, and improve. It's like my laptop dying was actually my novels way of saying "I don't care about this laptop, you need to improve me, I'm shockingly bad right now, get your act together, slow down, refresh and clear your mind, and come back and write a better version of me.... I wanna sparkle!"

So with most things you just need to take your time! Just needed to remind myself that.