On Anxiety

If you see this post and haven't read Anxiety yet, then be aware that everything below the break discusses it and includes spoilers, as far as that matters for a story like this.

This story is in many ways deeply personal and is heavily influenced by my own experiences, and so there are several important acknowledgements to make.

Like this version of Twilight Sparkle, I have OCD, though it manifests rather differently (though purposefully doing tasks incorrectly is something I have done as part of my treatment for social anxiety). Still, the general outline of the treatment was the same, moving from doing things that cause a fairly low degree of uncertainty to ones that seem almost impossible to contemplate doing at the beginning. The example Soothing Blossom gives of the pony afraid of the dog is one my first therapist gave me (minus the equine nature, of course), and it stuck with me quite a bit, perhaps because much of my anxieties exist in a space where it's not so easy to know whether or not the dog actually has bitten me, so to speak. My own interactions with my therapist and family when my OCD was at its worst also played a role in thinking about how Twilight's family would react and what they might say to her at different points.

To be clear, that includes Shining Armor's comments about Twilight's bravery. I really don't think I'm that brave, but my therapist once made similar comments to me, and it felt like something he would say. In short, this story would almost certainly not exist if it were not for my own experiences and the people who helped me through them, and I owe all of them my eternal gratitude (and apologies for the delayed nature of this acknowledgement relative to the publishing of the story).

On the more technical side of the writing, I actually went back and forth quite a bit on whether to ever put Twilight's thoughts in first person. I ultimately decided to keep the entire story in third person, partly because I hoped it would convey the sense of uncertainty that pervades everything if the narration itself is somewhat less clear on whether or not everything is, in fact, in order. I don't know if that actually worked in practice, but I still think I prefer avoiding anything in the first person for this story.

Finally, I also changed the ending quite a lot from the first draft. Initially, Twilight decides not to check her bags and drifts peacefully off to sleep. That certainly is a plausible event for one night, but I didn't want to convey a sense of finality since it doesn't just end like that. Even with that nice little ending, any extension of the story would necessarily have her continue to deal with her anxiety, so I left it more open as to whether or not she did check her bags.