As a teenager I was very anxious. I had a lot of energy and passion that I wanted to channel into creative things, and I always felt like I wasn't achieving enough.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My anxiety level of my own work and what I'm doing and focusing on my art and all of that stuff? That's fundamental.
When I was young, I was just about hard work. But as I got older, I did experience anxiety, doubt, judgment, and it's so easy to lose yourself for a second.
I felt all the things that other teenagers felt. I was insecure in lots of ways, over-confident in others. I was very emotional. Excitable.
I was not a silly kid or outgoing. In fact, I suffered from quite a bit of anxiety. I used to have panic attacks when I was a teenager, really incapacitating moments, because I had some phobias.
I was going through a divorce, and I had a lot of reading I was doing, and I developed what was probably a serious anxiety problem - because I was about as poor as you can get, in graduate school, and trying to make my work and keep my head above water.
As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs.
I'm totally an anxious mess all the time. There's a constant dialogue going on in my brain, and it's just reminding me of all the failures that I have had, and all of the things I need to do, and all of the things I'm not doing good enough.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
Growing up, I was prone to anxiety.
In my twenties, I was a bit of a worrier; it bothered me what people thought of me, what job I was doing.