Just one more sleep until the start of my nightmare-dream conference! But at least I’ve slept a little better the last few days than I normally do leading up to such a big stressor. One thing that seems to be helping is having learned that I am a planner.
But planning itself was not initially enough to help me through writing events. I needed to understand why I am a planner, what created the internal wound that feeds into this felt need, so that I could figure out how planning could help me through the conference overwhelm.
My internal planning need runs deep—way back to July 1985 as best I can tell. I was 5 years old, but it was actually my sister’s 7th birthday, and we were visiting my grandparents on Long Island. Whenever those two events coincided, my sister got a special birthday-girl shopping trip. Ever the practical one, that year she bought herself a pink plastic Barbie suitcase and new socks and underwear to fill it with.
Later that same week, a hurricane climbed up the eastern seaboard and stalled out over Long Island. The guest room where we were staying had a huge picture window view of the street—a street which was rapidly flooding with the torrential rains. Whitewater boils overwhelmed the drains, sweeping over the sidewalks and lapping at the yards all around my grandparents’ neighborhood. Since it was still broad daylight when our 7:00pm bedtime came around, we kids whispered about the rising floodwaters instead of going to sleep. My sister felt confidently prepared with her underclothes that would stay dry in her new plastic suitcase, and she also announced that she planned to float on said suitcase if it came to it. I, on the other hand, felt woefully unprepared. No way to pack anything I needed or wanted or to float safely down the street or to survive any of the other worries that were flooding my every thought.
The water never did rise into the yards, but the fear it brought never receded from my mind either. As soon as I got back to my own home in rural Missouri, I started planning. For tornados. For floods. For fires. You name it. I did not want to face life’s uncertainties unprepared ever again.
Sounds normal, right? Sound like something that most kids outgrow at some point, right? Or at the very least, it seems like this writing conference four decades later shouldn’t be in any way connected, right? I told myself that and more. But the reality is, my body responds to this conference as if I were still that 5 year old girl staring at the rain as it overwhelmed the street, needing to have some kind of a plan to survive.
Enter my Writing Conference Self-Care Plan. These are the top 5 things that I have learned that I can control to help reduce my overwhelm, and it works best when I share it with someone else at the conference who knows me. Sometimes these steps work to provide some relief—like cracking open the top of a soda can to let all of the fizz out. Other times they work more like an escape hatch—because I won’t have to try to explain things to a concerned friend that will be beyond my capacity to do in those moments of overwhelm.
It’s not a perfect fix by any means. I still might struggle and often do. But somehow, being able to unpack the known layers of my anxiety into a tenable plan is like giving 5-year-old me her own pink plastic suitcase—dry underclothes and all. It’s like giving her a chance to feel at least a little prepared in the face of this storm’s uncertainties.
Kristen C. Strocchia—Children's Writer & Speaker 