THE WRITER’S LIFE
It’s said that there are three people in all of us: the person we see ourselves as; the person others see; and the person we actually are. Sometimes I’ll host a meeting of the three in my own mind. I was wondering what to do with this latest personality crisis: Take a break, to see how it develops, perhaps signing off of the blog for a while before going off-grid; or just spilling my guts here, this being my blog after all. But this blog is part of the crisis, and I know that others have them too. So maybe something I write might strike a chord somewhere unseen.
The latest question of existence centres around a shift I’m experiencing, personally and mentally. In reality, I’m allowing myself to reconnect more with the many emotions which are dampened by my anti-depressant medication. This is not to say the drugs don’t work (cannabis does), nor that I’ve stopped taking my prescription; It’s more about my ever-developing mind, a thing which comes with its own blessings, but laden with baggage nonetheless. And the thing is, writing about it could prove paradoxical, as questions give rise to more when you interrogate something. My inner writer is damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
The biggest inner conflict, is that this blog is my platform, and my marketing tool for self-promotion of my digital self (social anxiety prevents me from being too confident in the organic world). But this is also my blog, and my public diary, where the less socially awkward me can be open, with others and myself. So fuck it.
Many of my struggles, I simply can’t write about, because they involve third parties. Some are the people I wronged when I was drunk, and with whom I’m now reconciled, but still the truly repentant man feels guilt, and that’s a life sentence. As an alcoholic, some would still expect me to relapse, but I didn’t and I won’t, with so much at stake. Sobriety has also given me the ability to be a constantly evolving writer. In some ways, it comes down to that imaginary big red button again: The one which if pressed, would make me ‘normal’ again. Yet I still wouldn’t press it, even though parts of me are perpetually confused (the word is discombobulated).
Just last night, I finished reading Cyrus Song to a friend who has difficulty reading. In that sentence alone, there is much to celebrate: Someone who wouldn’t otherwise have read my book (one which was hailed by a book critic as “an extraordinary juggling act…”), heard the sound of the Cyrus Song, and that person gained the knowledge of the book through my altruistic gesture. Because, trust me, reading my own stories to others is one of my least favourite things to do (except when I wrote bedtime stories for my children), because I tend to write in a way which is better read and absorbed by the same person.
My friend wasn’t a captive audience: she’d asked me if I could read the book to her, as she genuinely wanted to read it, but couldn’t. There was no coercion or subterfuge at all, and at the end, my listener was silenced for a moment, before muttering a stream of expletives. With this particular friend, those happenings are respectively rare and uncommon words of praise. Despite not being bound and gagged, she suggested she’d been captivated throughout, which was borne out by an unusual disinterest in anything to do with her phone.
But I felt somehow unfulfilled. I started to doubt the book and myself, and to question my friend’s enthusiasm. I was getting paranoid (it goes well with anxiety). And then I realised what it was.
Even though I’ve read Cyrus Song several times (I wrote it, edited it, and re-wrote it), I still pick it up now and then to look something up as I plan other stories. And sometimes I’m still struck by something I wrote, as though someone else wrote it. And it’s because I see someone else as writing it, that I see it as being a good book.
I’ve already said that I write in a way which is meant to immerse, and it seems I can do that with my writing, but not when I’m reading it aloud. It’s my social anxiety vs. digital self-confidence issue again. There’s a different person reading to myself in my head, than the one who reads aloud (I’ve not been diagnosed with any multiple personality disorder, but I’m on the bi-polar ‘spectrum’). It’s just low self-esteem, despite the facade.
Anxiety and social conscience are self-perpetuating and mutual. Even though I’m more in touch with the universe and the person inside me, when expressed digitally, I still suffer some form of human recursivity. It sounds odd, because it is. It’s just like the previously latent part of my brain awakening in sobriety, and getting my mind firmly around concepts like quantum physics. Now, through greater inner focus (and the time to do it), I feel as though I’m opening up other dimensions in my mind, which allows me to turn things inside out, then back again, in my thinking and in my writing (hopefully with the latter making the former more intelligible).
Days spent alone, reading, thinking and writing, are the ones which feel most productive, as it’s the best means I have of getting things out there. My writing is said to convey a great understanding of the human condition, which isn’t surprising when I carry so many around. It’s become a perpetuity of solitude, where my words are the best way for me to leave home, and where the cracks of the actor inside can’t be seen.
Delirium Tremens 