Of paychecks and stage fright

Some wonderful people I do temp vet work for recently forgot to pay me (I finally got brave enough to ask about it and they felt terrible) and then my FNSB (Fairbanks North Star Borough)School District paycheck for the Dec.2-21 got lost in the mail. Yesterday -- January 9th-- I opened my p.o. box to find it dog-eared and crumpled, its perforated edges ripped off. They sent it from an office three miles from my house on the morning of Friday, Decemeber 21.
So I can
A. Feel sorry for myself some more, or
B. get on with it
. . .option 'b' comes complete with the imagery of my hand reaching into the postal sorting machine in Anchorage and yanking my paycheck out of the gears. Thanks. That's two months of rent right there.

I've read this book before, but picked it up again and opened it to the exact page I needed:

The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
by Alice Weaver Flaherty

I've long known that the more emotionally invested I am in a project, and the further along in its revision I am, the harder it is to get the work done without trashing my body with coffee, sugar, and lousy self-talk. Which then looks like, volume-wise, writers' "block". Flaherty spends much of her book discussing temporal lobe epilepsy, hypergraphia, the neurology of hormones and the infamous Ann Sexton. But the page I opened to said "[something, something, something else] for this type of block, psychologists must look at stage fright as a model . . .".

Bingo.
And it's helping so far, this "feeling the fear" and green tea and other sensory distractors and stuff.
The book I am writing "Foundling" is a creation myth, and it opens with the biblical genesis followed the creation of a strong interracial friendship (a meta-discourse of Afro-Europeanism) I'm "copying" Toni Morrison in the way she used the "Dick and Jane" myth as signalment in The Bluest Eye. Did I mention you should read that book . . .