Day 30 - Shooting Stormtroopers

Today is November 30th, which you all know marks the last day of NaNoWriMo. It isn't that surprising (to me at least) that I did not win this year. University is tougher than I realized and although last year I managed to hang on by my finger tips and reached the 50.000 mark just in time, this year it just wasn't meant to be.

Aside from my normal studies which are tough enough I also have a monstrous subject at the moment which requires us to do as much homework for each lesson than most subjects ask for a whole week. Plus we had a performance this month.

Not to make excuses, just so that you know what was going on with my life.

I'm not ashamed to say that this month has been really tough on me both mentally and physically. I have never in my life felt this tired for such a long stretch of time. Because of stress I couldn't sleep, think or function properly. I felt like a thousand voices were talking to me at once while someone was shouting questions at you in a language you didn't know and demanding an answer anyway, all the while you were so tense that you felt you wanted to scream. No wonder it was hard to write (or do anything really).

I am much better now. Once I realized what was happening to me I started to create a list of things that calm me down and started to do this every time I felt anxious again. Normally I would include writing but... the voices...
The list include:

- Shooting stormtroopers (aka play Battlefront and shoot, don't think)
- Painting
- Ink drawings (something about drawing lines really calms me down. Resulting in a lot of trees over the last couple of weeks)
- listening to music (anything from calming to really hyper music which strangely clamed me down as well)
- Singing LOUDLY and without shame
- Taking a walk
- Reading

All this to try and keep my thoughts away from school and everything that was waiting for me. Including the Shakespeare performance we had to do yesterday and prepared for, for nearly two months (a blog post on that later).

I think taking these little moments and simply doing something for ourselves, just drinking a cup of tea and thinking of nothing, listening to the Lord of the Rings music and imagining yourself to be in the Shire (very relaxing) is extremely important to keep calm and keep sane. I was so focused on everything I had to do that I forgot about the things I could and wanted to do. I forgot about the little things.

All that being said, I am happy to announced that I just spent two hours writing and managed to at least get half the words!

Final NaNo count: 25.114

That is probably about 24.000 words more than I would have writen this month otherwise. Which goes to show, NaNoWriMo is never a waste!

If you participated how did your NaNo go? And remember we're all winners! :)
If you have any more great relaxation idea's please feel free to post them in the comments!

Keep Writing!

xx Noortje