Morning Pages

Eric said that I need to write.

Indeed, many people have said – commanded nearly – that I write, usually when I read something that I have written out loud: a maid of honor speech, a memorial, the story of my recovery. That to not write would be squandering a very obvious talent and the world is in need of the musings of sensitive, literate, articulate people such as myself.

I very much doubt that.

That I doubt that, which of course is incontrovertible fact in my brain, could be caused by a number of different mechanisms.

1. Does the world really need anything? Aren’t we all just sort of muddling along somehow in a desperate search to feed ourselves long enough to send our genes catapulting to the next generation so they can stalk along in the same interminable dance that we did, and our forefathers (forepeople?) and theirs before them. What is need anyway? Or the point of art? Distraction? Making the seemingly pointless dance on this earth more manageable? Continuing in the pursuit of questionably important higher goals like truth or beauty or compassion? That sounds fatalistic or nihilistic. Neitzche would be proud.  Maybe I need an anti-depressant again. But I am currently ill with a stomach flu, the convalescence of which is abhorrent to me because it means that I am stuck alone with the thoughts in my brain. And we all know that if my brain is bored it turns to its number one addiction: depressive self-loathing. I would have done well in some god-foresaken atelier in a Parisian winter.
2.  Image of godforesaken atelier brings me to the second point, which is that I am now, and perhaps have been since I was capable of thought and introspection, consumed by self-doubt and self-hatred. The twin afflictions having wrought considerable damage to my life, but perhaps none more so afflictive in that they have effectively halted my ambitious aspirations. Who I am to think that I could be x? Who am I to believe that I can do y? Don’t you remember all of the times that you fucked up? That you failed? That you sabotaged yourself? Look at all of the other billion people in the world. Surely most of them are better suited, more talented, better in pretty much every demonstrable way than you, and you could never ever not in a million years measure up to them, so why even bother? So you can taste the bitter and all too familiar taste of rejection? What are you, a masochist? Don’t embarrass yourself. Consign yourself to a small life full of teensy successes. Celebrate the infinitesimal victories. Surely you would cower under the pressure of anything else. Break into a million pieces at the thought of competition or a less than guaranteed gamble. Body shaking and paralyzed by anxiety at the mere thought of being judged. And you know what makes it even worse, is that the anxiety prevents the output. That it puts the brakes on the effortless outpouring that any art demands. That the blood flows to initiate the flight or flight survival mode: heart racing, pupils dilating, sweat pouring, and diverts it away from any generative area of the brain. Even now, so much wasted energy is being spent being anxious and trying to combat the anxiety with the well worn skills of CBT, that I am surprised that there is even room enough for me to write a coherent sentence.  Why put myself through the struggle? It’s exhausting. Better to flat-line through life in a series of distractions: other people’s creations.
3. Why do it at all? Because other people said I should? Isn’t that striving for their approval? Another example in a life filled with people-pleasing and existing at the mercy of someone else’s whims? It is so painful for me to do so. Writing is so painful. Has been for years, or at least since Ms. Martin’s AP English class senior year in which her seemingly steely and judgmental and harsh demands caused multiple 2 AM panic attacks. I wanted the A. I wanted the AP credit. I wanted to please her but she seemed so completely unpleasable. So threatening with her grimaces and her odd wardrobe choices. She wanted something specific from me and seems to expect a lot of me but I don’t know if I have what she wants. Oh, the struggle of that year of my life. How it completely changed my relationship with a blank sheet of paper – before that brimming with possibility, now only brimming with terror. Fun side note to that year – she gave me the English award at the end. I emailed her flabbergasted, and she poo pooed my shock, listing out the tangible accomplishments: the 800 on the writing SATs, the superb enactment of Hamlet’s lesser soliloquy, the paper on Tess of the D’Ubervilles.  Also odd note to this passage: I wrote it, at first, all in the present tense. This all happened 14 years ago, and yet it seems so immediate. As if I am still an 18 year old young woman attempting to please a woman who reminds me of a cross between Shannon and Mrs. Umbridge. Maybe I still am. Maybe she exists as a shadow phantom in my brain, still taunting me with her emotionless unobtainable standards, and beady exacting unforgiving stare. I imagine a public reading this as a series of her. Endlessly duplicating, growing larger and larger by the second, each one growing larger individually, and then multiplying. A public full of people with no time for my emotions, for my deviations, for me. A public obsessed with standards and comparisons. Who takes something as seeming liberating as the act of writing and turns it into a quantitative precise enterprise. Odd though in that I was exceptionally good at the quantitative work – A’s in every Science subject ever except freshman biology when I actually had friends for the first time. Why is it such a problem when it comes to writing? Maybe because it feels fundamentally different. Maybe because it feels so completely personal. The searching for the right word, phrase, punctuation mark so much more intimate that regurgitating a series of scientific facts. So much more of who I am exposed because of that. So much more of who I am subject to scrutiny. So much more perilous. Maybe that’s why I took comfort in the sciences. Clear right or wrong. Little ambiguity. A subject detached from the more thorny pieces of self: memories, traumas, opinions, thoughts. Very few blank pages. Except grant applications but I never advanced far enough forward for those. Writing is hard.

But is it worthwhile in the end? I do have to say that I feel the ever so smallest blossoming of pride within myself as I reread this. Not that I think anyone will read it, but that I spent some time creating instead of just consuming. That my brain feels less cluttered, more aired out, not so many ruminations and thoughts jangling about in the middle. I often have felt this way post journaling. That my brain seems to do better at thinking something out when I write it, rather than just speak or think it. That this act, though challenging for the above enumerated reasons, feels, ultimately cathartic and necessary.  That perhaps this act, writing, could be one of the many salves that I have needed to slay the twin monsters of depression and anxiety. Maybe.

New plan for mental health monster slaying:

1. Continue with medication and therapy as you have been doing. A+ on appointment follow through and regular consumption of medication. Very good job, old boy.
2. Bare minimum use of Facebook. Clearly the antichrist. Bastion of comparisonitis and desperate need for external validation. Also horrendous time-waster. There are so many fascinating topics and people and art out there in the world. Why waste one more second reading a meme?
3. Exercise. I know, I know. Advice for how to cure what ails you so often doled out you think that therapists and doctors were subsidized by Adidas and Lululemon. But clear substantiated evidence that increasing your heart rate for at least 30 minutes a day leads to improved mood, less anxiety, more energy. Actual mechanism of action perhaps unclear, probably multi-faceted: increased blood flow to brain, endorphins, enhances feeling of competency and goal achievement, socialization if you don’t just lift weights in your basement, long term regular exercise makes your body look more like the ideal which is good for esteem (probably the least self-actualized of the reasons, but vanity is potentially motivating.)  Join a gym perhaps? Planet fitness, mactivity, the Y all failed attempts at regular gym attendance. Comparisonitis sets in when surrounded by more Adonis like ideals, and also there’s that weird “guy staring at you” thing which is possibly good in that it could make you feel wanted, but is mostly bad as it makes you feel judged and it reminds me of that failed romance with the Filipino gym trainer.  How complicated all of this shit is. How come it can’t be simple? Exercise is good for you, so go! No, no, like everything else made impossibly complicated by the traumas and doubts and insecurities and overthinking.
4. Meditate every day. Another god damn clusterfuck. Cormac and Mark and Veneira. All negative social results of group meditation. Wow, clear pattern emerging. Nothing is ever as simple as it should be. Maybe I should just give it another go. Clearly screwed it up in the past but interpersonal effectiveness skills are better so perhaps I could do it better. Also could just meditate home alone.
5. Write. Just fucking do it.