Anxiety in any dosage can blind a person. It blinds by forcing one to focus on the difficulty of a task rather than the actual task itself. When I was first beginning to learn about rhetoric, I struggled due to the fact that I was simply not a persuasive writer. I would overanalyze every aspect of the difficulty involved with rhetoric rather than focus my attention on how to write in a persuasive manner. Consequentially, my writing suffered until I overcame this blinding anxiety. As I wrote more persuasive papers my anxiety slowly faded but the memory of my very first persuasive writing assignment remained.
I had never written a paper this complex before. How could I write a paper that consisted of twenty-five hundred to three thousand words? It seemed like madness to even think that such a task was possible. What if I ran out of ideas? What if I was not persuasive enough? What if I ran out of strong words to use? My palms began sweating; I had to take a breath. I regained my composure and said to myself, “I can do this.” I had gone through this same feeling of butterflies in my stomach before in previous classes. This sort of overwhelming anxiety was awoken from time to time in scenarios similar to this. I just had to focus on the prompt and I would do fine, just like always. I glanced around the dim lit room searching for ideas in my head and hoping to figure out how to create a concise thesis statement. I stood up from my chair, bent over, and began rummaging through my unorganized backpack searching for the book I had to write about, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I began flipping through page after page while still thinking of what to write for my thesis. I was not technically reading anything in my book while flipping the pages; it served to get some built up energy out of my system. My heart rate began rising again, my face began getting pinker, the anxiety was once again coming back. The topic began slipping out of my hands like a bar of soap and was quickly replaced with the fixation on the difficulty of the task. The irrelevant thoughts began rushing through my head once again. It felt as though my head was about to explode. I threw my book to the other side of the room and myself onto my bed, I had to take another breath.
I woke up the next morning, it was a Sunday and I had all day to work on my paper. I decided that I should start by looking back at my sticky notes that I had placed throughout the novel in order to figure out some sort of thesis statement. After about an hour of writing down important events I decided it was time to start formulating some sentences that could be possible thesis statements. At the end of another hour, I had five possible thesis statements but I could not make a decision on which one to choose. I began noticing minute effects of tension and anxiety once again while my eyes were beating down at the piece of yellow-lined paper. At this point, I became more fixated once again on the difficulty of choosing between five options. It felt as though I was taking a multiple choice test. “I have a twenty percent chance at picking the correct choice. Which one is the correct answer?” I then began thinking about how my thesis statement was due tomorrow in class. If I did not have a thesis statement to share I would be left out of group discussion and I would get a zero in the grade book for participation. My tension began building higher and higher and I kept on over analyzing the difficulty of the task rather than the actual task. My palms began perspiring first as always, next my face began feeling though I was sitting face first in front of a campfire, and finally the feeling as though my head were about to explode returned. I quickly stood up, walked over to the doorway and turned on the lights. The room was too dark to work and after sitting in a chair for a few hours it felt good to stand up. I began pacing back and forth contemplating and planning my paper in my head. After a few minutes, I sat back down and made my decision on my thesis statement. I took a deep breath, looked up at the clock, and realized it was ten o’clock. I had worked a total of about fourteen hours on my paper. I then stood up, walked over to my lamp, and turned off the light. It was time to get some sleep, I had school in the morning.
After school ended the next day I felt exhilarated about how well my thesis was compared to my classmates. Even though writing is taught to not be a competition, I felt a thrill in a little competition from time to time. My thesis took a long time to formulate but at the end, my claim was excellent because it had a wide variety of reasons for its validity. Once I got home I decided to begin working on my paper in order to get the draft done by Wednesday. I walked into my room, turned the lights on and began tidying up my homework papers for other classes that cluttered my entire room. I sat down at my desk and decided to start by free writing my introduction paragraph. The words were flowing like the Colorado River, from my head, and onto my paper. It was as if my anxiety, the clouding blindness that prevented me from focusing on my task, had disappeared in its entirety. After finishing my introduction paragraph, I decided to try a different approach and skip to my conclusion paragraph in order to set a domain and range for my paper. By doing so, I narrowed the margin for going off topic and then later feeling anxiety once again because a good portion of my paper is off topic. I ended up finishing both my introduction and conclusion paragraph within half an hour of starting and decided it was time for a break. At this point, the hard work was done and I simply had to focus on filling in the blanks.
After finishing that paper, I began feeling much more comfortable with my writing and how I would convey my ideas. I began taking chances and actually connected and personalized with my writing as time passed. It took an ample amount of time to fully notice a difference in my writing and the anxiety that came with it but, I can confidently say that it started with this paper. Anxiety caused a great deal of blindness for any task that I attempted because it prevented me from seeing the importance of learning what was being taught. Rhetoric not only taught me how to persuade people with my writing and speaking, it also taught me how to control my anxiety with any task I was given.
