Creating or Clinging, Anxiety Arises

Because it is possible to create [one’s self,] one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.

Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self.

–Rollo May in The Meaning of Anxiety
via Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Creativity | Brain Pickings.