The perpetual contradiction of chronic mental unwellness is this: a burning desire to achieve normality paired with a fear of not being sufficiently broken. This is my perpetual contradiction, anyway, because I have never not been full of contradictions, but at the very least I have a knack for identifying them. This knack is almost, no, unambiguously is, compulsive. The constant need to be one step ahead of any accusations of hypocrisy, or be so vigilant as to bring my own self-perceived hypocrisy to others’ attention in the first place, is one I could pin on any number of childhood experiences or traumas or so on; frankly, after spending so long relitigating the past out of an equally compulsive need to understand why and how things are the way they are, all that matters is that the urge is there. All that matters is that self-critique becomes self-destruction when you decide your own flaws eclipse the right to critique or even accurately recognize others’. All that matters is that one day you might wake up and realize you are so suffocated by your own incessant need to cover all the theoretical bases in all things you do and say that you have spent years, if not a life thus far, presuming passivity and rationality of others that you never could trust yourself to embody. All that matters is that someone could tell you the sky is green and the grass is blue (outside of central Kentucky in the early fall, that is) and you would lay yourself bare trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with you for not seeing it, for getting it all mixed up like this, for not having the right attitude, the right perspective, the proper amount of selflessness.
All that matters is that when your friends ask you how you are, the phrase samsara speedrun emerges, and so too do the trips to the pharmacy.
I have always found the idea of a five-year plan unsettling. I can’t really say why; maybe it’s that breaking overwhelming things down into processable chunks often actually does work for me, and in the context of life itself, I’d rather not contemplate the number of five-year increments I actually have left.
So I might have a one-year plan, or as was the case until recently, a two-year plan, but beyond that it’s all awash in the abstract daydreams of the far and indefinite Future, the one that cannot be quantified but can still be fantasized about enough to weather the discomforts of the present. Because that’s what it’s all about, is it not—the present as a train to the future, the present as a layer of building blocks which are being placed the way they are because of the immovable placement of the layer below and the layer below that and so on, never mind calling the foundation into question!!! Obviously I tried making the requisite New Year’s resolutions about Living In The Moment, but no matter how hard I tried to make this a concrete goal it always slipped back into the abstract. What, exactly, does living in the moment consist of? I would ask, and this is further complicated when your heart is involved in something or someone in a very particular way, and all you can seem to think about are the ways in which you must minimize your desires about that big, long forever-and-ever future with that thing or person or component of identity in your life so as not to lose something from gripping it too tightly. You order books on attachment theory and tell yourself to quit being so anxiously attached; you try and practice the kind of Zen indifference you find yourself provided with when you go looking for something more substantial. You silence your phone so as not to be anxiously awaiting a notification but compulsively check it every few minutes anyway, thereby eliminating the usefulness of the exercise beyond preventing a sudden sharp little sound from wrecking your already-wrecked nervous system.
Supplements: ashwagandha, L-theanine, milk thistle, lemon balm (wait—but what about your thyroid?), magnesium (make sure it’s glycinate and not citrate or oxide, obviously!!), who knows, who cares. You order some St. John’s Wort but it ends up being a no-go because the inevitable does eventually happen, and you can’t take St. John’s Wort with an SSRI. It happens quite fast, actually, as though you manifested into existence with your own desire to intellectualize or perhaps more accurately yap too close to the sun. Whatever the reason, you find yourself returning to the embarrassingly dramatic and annoyingly paperwork-filled rigmarole of the American acute mental health care system, getting little out of it, waking up in a cold sweat no matter if it’s your bed or one you get significantly closer to meeting your insurance deductible with. How long has it been? Two weeks. But how long has it really been? A month and a half. No, really? A year? Two years? Two years ago, was this all in your two-year plan? You didn’t have one. But you were making one now, for the first time, right up until the floor fell out. Life’s not fair, you lament, and to try and circumvent your nonexistent appetite and general malaise you sip gingerly at a strawberry smoothie from a chain restaurant who has no business charging $7 for a mediocre smoothie but persists with the veneer of vague suburban-fancy just enough for chumps like me to buy it and think, ‘wow, that’s insane, but I guess it’s Panera.’ Your therapist tells you some things. Your psychiatrist tells you some things. Your friends tell you things, your family, your social media recommended feed tells you some things, even, because it’s managed to figure out very quickly exactly what shortform videos about the evils of Avoidants and how to move on when your entire life feels shattered, men-aren’t-shit, etc. etc. to show you. You delete the apps off your phone. Tomorrow you’ll download them again, and delete them again, a Sisyphean lie to yourself about having a shred of willpower left right now.
You have to be more guarded, you tell yourself. Except to live with the level of guardedness seemingly required to prevent this kind of pain seems kind of bleak.
I love preemptively grieving a loss. I hate it and it makes me neurotic, but I keep doing it, so maybe it’s some sort repressed Freudian masochism. I do it so often that when loss does finally occur it feels as though any thoughts I had of things being different were borderline delusional. It’s hard to say whether this is true or not because when you feel deeply enough about everything, it all kind of feels like being underwater. But so, too, does the medication which helps you not feel quite so deeply. A common justification I’ve provided in explaining to loved ones what Prozac does for me is this: I feel so deeply and intensely and neurotically that the numbing a ‘normal’ person, or perhaps only mildly depressed or anxious person who probably just needed to DBT or psychoanalysis or whatever, feels is actually only bringing me a little closer back down to earth. Even ‘numbed’, I am far from numb, only less debilitated by the hunted prey feeling that underscores my daily experiences. Sometimes the magnitude of my emotions without medication makes for excellent fiction writing, or at least a very visceral experience channeling my emotions into my characters and vice versa.
But I could just as easy look at what I’ve written during a Prozac-less period and find it kind of shit; melodramatic, self-indulgent. Which view is the ‘true’ one? Which is a more objective assessment of…things that cannot be objectively assessed but I nevertheless have decided others besides myself are able to?
I recall my creative writing teacher in high school being very insistent that any good artist of any sort had to have a slightly inflated ego. Not deleteriously big, but big enough to be slightly crazy and believe in their own importance to the extent that it was a non-negotiable: the artist has something to share with the world. The world needs that thing. Could we meet halfway, I thought nervously, at the point where I believe the world is at least not worse off with my creative output in it? Self-deprecation was met with reprimanding. Excessive justification and preambles to workshop pieces were cut off. It wasn’t cutthroat, but it wasn’t coddling, either. I sometimes found myself very frustrated by this aversion to elaboration and prefacing and whatnot, because I found the act of acknowledging my work’s weaknesses right out of the gate to be a protective mechanism—if I called it out, then I could at least keep a shred of dignity intact by showing I had some level of self-awareness.
Because there’s nothing more vulnerable than inviting others to take your creative labor of love to task, save for love in general. When the workshop tears your work to shreds you have two options, as far as bad attempts to save face go: double down and believe your genius to be unappreciated by the undiscerning masses, or apologize profusely and clarify over and over that you do, in fact, know that ___ is a problem and ___ needs more development or ___ needs to be cut and you know That This Sucks and to yourself this takes shape as You Suck, Period and you either nervously laugh it all off or dissolve into tears.
For what it’s worth, I don’t recall a lot of tears in any writing workshops I’ve been in throughout my life, be it high school or college or outside the context of education altogether. I recall tears after the fact, others’, my own, whether in private or only ceremonially private by way of disappearing into the hall when the ordeal was finished. In my desire to simultaneously justify and disavow my own creative decisions I still managed to harden myself the necessary amount over time, keeping the messiness quarantined below the surface. This isn’t bad, per se; ideally, I wouldn’t merely be hiding deep-seated insecurities for fear of projection but rather have those insecurities tackled to begin with; but what-fucking-ever. In love and art and the intimacy of community and relationships and creation you cannot wait until you have it all figured out to be a part of the world. You do not need permission, a preamble, a giant red pen that scraps everything anyone even briefly critiques and writes into the margins anything anyone briefly suggests. No, like a grammar-checking program or something more niche like Hemingway Editor (which has now jumped on the AI bandwagon anyway, yuck) or your parents’ well-meaning advice once you’ve reached a certain age, there are things you take and you leave. You assess the world holistically and thus assess yourself holistically because you are not some deranged aberration, but part of the whole speaking to itself—
Or you don’t. Maybe you just aspire to. It’s hard out here. But you can at least remember to take your meds.