The A Side ✔

11- The Makings of A for Anxiety

How the idea of the story came about was just a typical day in moody British weather, I was sat back on the side of a bed with the window next to it which overlooked views of the countryside. For July, I felt freezing cold as I started to type on my tablet out of boredom. On logging into Wattpad, I happened to scroll by and click on the JustWriteIt page since I wanted to see what the task was. 

During this short process, I started to think back to the first year at College which I had graduated from just a week previously. My Anxiety had played out a lot and the multiple number of counselling sessions I had had over the academic year just weren't getting me anywhere. My counsellor knew that I loved to write but I never really discussed in much detail about my writing. That was before You and Me took off in popularity. 

I wanted to write about my Anxiety inspired by my own life story BUT not in a non-fiction memoir type format at first. It had to be fiction since I was paranoid that someone from my old school would stumble onto a memoir and recognise me. In reality, I should have written this last year but I felt too fragile. Avoiding a snooze fest is a tricky task to accomplish but once I saw other users open up about their mental health experiences, I was able to join in with the action.

A for Anxiety was born purely from basing the main character off of myself and my personal traits and taking real moments of turbulence and emotional stress and placing them into a story based in a school exploring the harsh reality of being unaccepted. I bet from this short paragraph that you readers may think my story is 110% depressing, it's not. For me, A for Anxiety was a way of opening up my real-life experiences without being judged.

I started writing it on the 1st of August last year and managed to write around 7 chapters before losing interest. In all truth, finding the right audience for the story proved to be more challenging for me than actually sitting down to write the story. Also, I felt that the story just wasn't me. I wasn't being honest about me. It sucked but I managed to write and post a few chapters several months ago. 

I may work on it after a few more planned projects get completed since the feedback that I did receive across the chapters so far were incredibly helpful.    

When A for Anxiety came 3rd in a Wattpad user-run competition, I was thrilled. I knew it wouldn't win since there were places that needed to be tightened up and the overall look of the story does portray as quite dark but honest. Fizz is a great character to develop, she feels unable to fully enjoy her life experiences because her Anxiety and panic attacks get dismissed as attention seeking and fake persona. Away from the daily grinds of life, Fizz keeps an anonymous blog about her life and the Anxiety struggles. A user known only as "The Boy" starts commenting on her posts but with no idea who this user may be, Fizz will learn who it is and this will change things for her but I won't say which way because that's spoilers ;)

The story is currently up on my profile if you are interested in giving it a try. I am open to all thoughts on it. 

Final thing: I don't regret trying to write a story like this, it's helped me to try and write something longer since I am more of a short story writer but confindence issues really hampered my efforts in finishing writing the novel sooner. I hate it when my Anxiety gets in the way of writing XD