If I can write at all these days it’s due to the specific ways in which I can manage my tendency to ruminate.
I wouldn’t qualify myself as obsessive - that word suggests to me connotations of action and imperative, even without its companion “compulsive” - but from the time I was young my mind had a tendency to skip like a broken record, in a way that I wasn’t even cognizant of until I had gotten older, and thought to actually count the number of times a certain word or string of thoughts repeated in my mind.
“Ruminate” feels like the right word to me. Perhaps this is simply due to its similarity in sound to “marinate”, which is not unlike “stewing”, which is what ruminating feels like. It is immersing in a word, or a thought, and letting the feelings that word or thought provokes thicken and stick to you. Ruminative depression manifested in my teenage years as a pungent substance inside my chest, lacquered by my thoughts.*
As I aged I found this tendency an unexpected asset as I considered writing, first essays and then fiction. I found it easy, insofar as most of the things I’d wanted to say were simply summoned from storage rather than made on the spot, lines and sentences coming out like diamonds where my repetitive focus had, over the years. pressed down and refined them.*
The first time I made contact with the writing world, Jia Tolentino interviewed me in 2012. She was an assistant editor at the Hairpin then (still new, but her formidable talent was already apparent), and I was so nervous that I wrote, not an essay, but an exhaustive list of everything I had always wanted to say about our subject, everything I had wondered over, every conclusion I had come to, and sent it to her. I was not in a good place at that time, and it was probably not appropriate; Jia was as generous to me as she would continue to be in the next few years. I remember her telling me that I ought to just write myself, and around that time I started to do just that.**
Over time I came to realize that while my ruminative mode was good for churning out the florid turns of phrase and marathon sentences full of em-dashes and commas and semicolons (and parentheticals and parataxic strings of “and”, thanks for that Cormac) that now come out of me, in lesser form, as a rote action, it was bad for my health. There was also the way that anxiety wrapped around it like a parasitic vine — I would often fixate but be unable to write. My mind was a stalled engine turning and moving me forward only fitfully.
Thus, psycho-pharmaceuticals. I’ve been on them in one or another form since I was a child (the question of psych meds and their effect on ~*society*~ is something I’ll leave by the wayside for now; suffice to say that I can’t live without them). In the last year and a half I switched from Wellbutrin / Bupropion to Prozac / Fluoexetine, as it seemed to me the former was aggravating my paralyzing anxious tendencies — things at work would accumulate and I wouldn’t be able to start on them no matter how hard I tried.
The effect of this change has been extremely pronounced. You can live with things like anxiety for long enough that their absence becomes absolutely surreal — I can get a gently critical note at work, I can tweet something stupid or get thrown a curveball in terms of things that need to be done for the day, and I can… see them and store them away, without them hammering thunder on the doors of my mind. It’s wild, and wonderful.
On the one hand, this makes certain aspects of reading / writing / task management far easier, and its effect on my moment-to-moment stress level goes without saying; but I worry that I lose something when I’m not forced to cling to a thought.
I don’t believe there’s an explicit relationship between psychic turmoil and creativity; it feels like a canard, and more than that I want all the creative people I love to be both happy and productive. But there was a time, back when Jia first interviewed me in New York, when I had switched my meds from Lexapro to Cymbalta (I have been around the block with my antidepressants), and the effect was profoundly negative; I suffered the most powerful suicidal ideation I’d ever experienced, to the point where I holed up in my room to avoid encountering the subway tracks. I cried constantly, and I cut myself, which I’d never done before or since.
But during that same period I was on a different, more intense creative wavelength. My facility for language pivoted into a kind of bizarre, molten poetry (which found a natural outlet, in those days, on Twitter), but more than that I had the urge to make visual art, which I had never done before.
I inherited an essential tremor from my mother. Even when I’m relaxed, my hands and fingers tremble. I cannot take pictures without motion blur, and anything requiring precise motor skills is more or less beyond me. I suspect my peculiarly cramped style of holding a pencil, and my tendency to write straight through the page, stems from the iron grip I had to maintain to counteract this. Coupled with a woeful paucity of spatial intelligence, this tremor discouraged me from believing I was capable of drawing, or painting. I considered myself wholly alienated from the creative world throughout my childhood and much of my adulthood.
But Cymbalta launched me into strange places, I found that I was compelled to do something with image, to create an object. So instead of doing what I felt I couldn’t do, I leaned on what I could - I traced household objects to create clean lines and shapes, and collaged with found materials. I interviewed friends and acquaintances and a few strangers — pre-Toast Dan Lavery, my friend John Cameron, comedian Julie Klausner, Thor Harris from Swans, etc. — and transcribed their answers to a sketchbook alongside my improvised collages, which I submitted to a contest-exhibition thing. I don’t know where I got most of the images, and I don’t remember doing any of the interviews.
It is like someone else made this thing and used my name. I just looked at it for the first time in almost 8 years — I at least had the foresight to pay the Brooklyn Art Museum to digitize it when I sent it to them. And I think it’s good. I was taken aback by some of the images I made, not to mention the sheer gall it took to seek out and record interviews with mostly people I didn’t know well or at all.
That experience, and the monument it created from me, is what bothers me, more than “did X start sucking when they got sober” dialogues over artists ever have. Because creative ambitions have come late in my life, and as much as my ruminative mind can torment me, there is something powerful and languid in slipping into its spaces. What does it mean that I did this thing that I’m proud of, that I would never have done were I not in a state of profound existential distress?
I wonder, sometimes, if being happy will deny me my pride, whether it will do something foolish like “deny me my potential”. But I think something along the lines of what I resolved when some of my favorite artists turned out to be bad, even violent people — in that case, I knew that the world was so thick with artists I didn’t know that the idea of my favorites being “irreplaceable” could only be read as absurd. And likewise, if there are mysterious vistas of creativity, be they strange or sublime or spectacular, that I cannot access without hurting myself, then they will stay distant and remote. There will be something else, some other creativity, that will do.
John
Links:
My digitized chapbook, "Correspondence School #1", at the Brooklyn Art Library
* One of these days I’ll write about the active metaphors I cherish and reuse, possibly to the detriment of their value or power. Lacquering is one of them, pressure-forming diamonds another. The foremost among them is the loose tooth.
** Were it that I could say I’m a protege of Jia’s… That idea flatters me enough that I don’t quite trust the memory of her advising me to write. We worked together while she was at the Hairpin a few times, she was exceedingly patient, and we met once while she was at Jezebel, but we have no further relationship to speak of. Shortly after her interview with me ran I was solicited by Nicole Cliffe to write for what would become The Toast, my first published essay.