Anchors can be negative or positive.

We can be hung up on an ex or "the one who got away" and refuse to move on from that person, who may often become an idealized representation of a series of events in our past history, and so anchored to a person who not only is not reachable or a part of our lives anymore, but who may never have existed as we choose to remember them. We may become anchored to goals which are not truly viable - I saw my former roommate do this over the past year as she was hell-bent on getting her doctorate in communications at a prestigious university (at any prestigious university) despite having, at best, a mediocre performance in pretty much all ways (master's classes, GRE scores, publication credits) that would qualify her to do so. There are anchors like obsession with physical appearance - anorexics undoubtedly feel anchored by their disease, but we can generally agree that anorexia and such obsession is a bad thing.

To have good anchors maybe it is necessary to be realistic.

But maybe not. I want to write, after all, but find myself faced with general "failure" time and again through repeated, near-unanimous rejections from poetry journals to which I submit my work. It doesn't stop me from writing but it discourages me from submitting. It's worth positing though that "publication" and "writing" are different goals and I do care more about the latter - however, the former is the easiest/best/quickest/most theoretically unbiased way to validate the latter.

I suppose this question can be interpreted as, what do you do (or try to do) every day that reaffirms the place that you would like to occupy in the world? This then makes me ask, what do I do every day? I don't write every day, I only try to. In the loosest definition of writing (casual texting, Hubski, email, etc being included) I do write every day, but in the artistic sense I write somewhat less. My goal is to write every day.

I'm afraid I don't have much in the way of answers for you lil, only navel-gazing.