I have a system for making decisions: if I'm not terrified, I'm doing something wrong.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not running around cliff jumping or swimming with sharks or sky-diving (despite the delusion of a friend that this will, actually, happen one day), but I do maintain a certain discomfort in my life. Accumulating 17 addresses in 15 years is part of that.
This past week the topic was general advice from some of the literary greats. In the process of going around this, the familiar vision of the long-suffering and depressed artiste came up. The lecturer didn't really advocate that you have to be this tortured soul to produce great work; instead it was more along the lines of: usually the moments that leave the longest impact involve some sort of loss.
Years and years ago, I had a drama teacher that claimed all (good) actors had a void inside themselves. It was this void, this lacking of something substantial, that allowed them to become other people. At the time it made complete sense to me, and it's been an idea that's floated around my head ever since, except expanded to all artists. If you're going to create universes, you have to have space for them to live in. You have to be missing something.
A bit more recently, I was speaking with a friend (not the one bent on pushing me out of a plane) who was concerned about not living in the moment at hand enough. My response was that no writer ever exists totally in the moment, even when they're in the moment. There's always some bit hanging back and taking notes. The Observer.
I think it's an incredibly difficult thing for writers to balance: experiencing life and creating fictitious experiences. Everything, in a way, just becomes research. Meanwhile your life carries on as if you're actually living it.
Making decisions. Quite a few of those choices I opted for because they terrified me were absolutely disastrous choices to make. They complicated my life. Things were lost or broken. People were lost or broken. But even in the worst moments, the Observer was back there taking notes. For every awful thing, I can remember of distinct moment of thinking, so this is what that feels like. Now I know. And the moments when things were going well, the moments I was content and comfortable, are always associated with an intense boredom and restlessness. A need to break away from that and turn things upside down again.
And there are consequences. I've reached a point in my life where I start saying goodbye as soon as I meet someone new, because I know I won't stay very long. I've filled my holes faster than I can possibly make them, and my life, that thing I own, most times feels a million miles away because I'm always looking through someone else's eyes.
Another friend of mine suggested once that the self-destruction most artists seem to carry with them comes from a certain over-saturation. Of living too many lives not your own and needing, at some point, to feel something that is you and outside of you and so dramatic the Observer is forced into silence, even if just for a second. And that, too, when she said it, made complete sense and started pacing around my head. I've had my own dalliances with self-destruction, with that nihilistic perspective that it doesn't really matter what happens, even, a few times, this conviction that, because I kept making it through various situations, I always would. So why try to avoid them?
At the moment, I'm putting a lot of time, effort and money into something that, ultimately, has a very slim chance of yielding the exact results I want. I've also put myself in a situation where I have to perform on demand, which is good practice but also carries that ever-present what if I run out of words?
It absolutely terrifies me.
I must be doing something right.
A bit more recently, I was speaking with a friend (not the one bent on pushing me out of a plane) who was concerned about not living in the moment at hand enough. My response was that no writer ever exists totally in the moment, even when they're in the moment. There's always some bit hanging back and taking notes. The Observer.
I think it's an incredibly difficult thing for writers to balance: experiencing life and creating fictitious experiences. Everything, in a way, just becomes research. Meanwhile your life carries on as if you're actually living it.
Making decisions. Quite a few of those choices I opted for because they terrified me were absolutely disastrous choices to make. They complicated my life. Things were lost or broken. People were lost or broken. But even in the worst moments, the Observer was back there taking notes. For every awful thing, I can remember of distinct moment of thinking, so this is what that feels like. Now I know. And the moments when things were going well, the moments I was content and comfortable, are always associated with an intense boredom and restlessness. A need to break away from that and turn things upside down again.
And there are consequences. I've reached a point in my life where I start saying goodbye as soon as I meet someone new, because I know I won't stay very long. I've filled my holes faster than I can possibly make them, and my life, that thing I own, most times feels a million miles away because I'm always looking through someone else's eyes.
Another friend of mine suggested once that the self-destruction most artists seem to carry with them comes from a certain over-saturation. Of living too many lives not your own and needing, at some point, to feel something that is you and outside of you and so dramatic the Observer is forced into silence, even if just for a second. And that, too, when she said it, made complete sense and started pacing around my head. I've had my own dalliances with self-destruction, with that nihilistic perspective that it doesn't really matter what happens, even, a few times, this conviction that, because I kept making it through various situations, I always would. So why try to avoid them?
At the moment, I'm putting a lot of time, effort and money into something that, ultimately, has a very slim chance of yielding the exact results I want. I've also put myself in a situation where I have to perform on demand, which is good practice but also carries that ever-present what if I run out of words?
It absolutely terrifies me.
I must be doing something right.
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