I still haven’t finished the Artist’s Way. Like my dear friend Jackie who found the weeks stretching into months, this “twelve-week” program has stretched into almost twelve months for me, and I’m still only on week eight. I haven’t cracked the book in four months.
In some ways this is because I have gotten what I needed from the program. In my last post I wondered whether I might stop writing for good. But despite what I said there, I never intended my break from writing to be permanent. I was terrified of becoming someone who puts my dreams in a drawer and eventually stops looking for them. And as of this fall, I am writing again! My lack of posts here might seem to contradict that statement, but I have gone back to being hard at work on my second novel.
But I don’t know if going back is the right phrase at all.
To go back is to return. The etymology of the word “return” is in part the Old French re- “back” and torner “to turn away or around; draw aside, cause to turn; change, transform; turn on a lathe.” The lathe draws in circles, and a return implies this circularity, the restoration of an original course or character. To turn implies change, to return, changing back.
But is it ever possible to change back? As the saying goes, no man steps into a river twice. In my case, the restoration of creative writing in my life has occurred through fundamental change. The person before my long break from creative writing was a person with undiagnosed and untreated manic depressive illness. Going on medication for that illness has been life-restructuring. I am no longer the person who created as a compulsion, who sketched out portraits and poems when I should have been paying attention in calculus. Once I was overflowing with emotions and ideas, and I needed to express them; to hold them within me was pain. And on what I used to think of as my good days, which I now experience infrequently and which I now think of as suspiciously good days, I was in a flow state that was not just incredibly fruitful creatively, but euphoric.
This, it turns out, was hypomania.
As Kay Redfield Jamison writes in Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament,
Two aspects of thinking in particular are pronounced in both creative and hypomanic thought: fluency, rapidity, and flexibility of thought on the one hand, and the ability to combine ideas or categories of thought in order to form new and original connections on the other. The importance of rapid, fluid, and divergent thought in the creative process has been described by most psychologists and writers who have studied human imagination. The increase in the speed of thinking may exert its influence in different ways. Speed per se, that is, the quantity of thoughts and associations produced in a given period of time, may be enhanced. The increased quantity and speed of thoughts may exert an effect on the qualitative aspects of thought as well; that is, the sheer volume of thought can produce unique ideas and associations.
Many people, including Jamison, have written about the connection between mental illness and creativity in a compelling way. I don’t have anything new to add to this conversation so I will not do so here. But I will admit that romanticizing my mental illness prevented me for a long time from seeking treatment even as I was unaware of how deep that connection was.
The worst part of being diagnosed with manic depressive illness, apart from the stigma, was the realization that I would have to bid my euphoric flow states farewell. In fact, many of the behaviors they will coach you not to do in treatment because they can trigger hypomania—over-caffeinating, not eating, not sleeping—were things I did before my diagnosis to enter this flow state. In a very real sense I was addicted to it. Hypomania and mania are associated with dopamine secretion, inhibited dopamine absorption, and dopamine receptor hypersensitivity; meanwhile, dopamine pathways are implicated in many highly addictive drugs, and dopamine is often thought of as the ‘reward molecule.’
I’m now on drugs that antagonize my dopamine receptors. As my body has equilibrated to them, the overflow of emotions and ideas has been replaced by a more even-keeled disposition that makes me better suited for everything but art. For months I could not access what I loved most about writing. I was yearning for what Michelle Tea of the Your Magic podcast describes as, “one of those sessions when the thoughts just roll out of you and time becomes irrelevant. When you look back over what you’ve written and you can’t actually remember typing it. It’s like someone else did it. It feels more like channeling. Moments like that do make writing seem utterly mysterious, magical, and mystical.” Try as I might, I couldn’t get there.
It was exactly what I had always feared about going on medication. But at the same time, the benefits were many. As I wrote in my morning pages (these are part of the Artist’s Way, and I’ve now been doing them for almost a year),
It was getting lost in flow that characterized so many of my bad days pre-meds; the inability to exercise consistently, or work, or feed myself, or stop running away with my bad thoughts on my bad days; all that stuff has gotten easier.
Before I got treatment, I had tried to kill myself and was also beginning to worry that I wouldn’t be able to hold down a normal (whatever that means) job. There was no case to be made in favor of rejecting treatment. But I wanted to have it all. I wanted the mystery and magic of writing back. I wrote, I don’t want writing to feel like ‘work’ the way everything else does now, even if it’s become easier for me to work than it ever was before.
This block brought me to the Artist’s Way.
So what did I learn?
One thing I learned is that my fixation with finished products sometimes stands in the way of me creating art. As someone with a demanding day job, I feel a lot of pressure to maximize my writing output. As part of the Artist’s Way you are encouraged to craft affirmations for yourself. One of my affirmations was “Good art takes time,” but I realized halfway through the Artist’s Way that I was focusing on the wrong part of this. It doesn’t mean that all my time should be spent on making something that will end up being good, but rather, in order to create good art, you have to spend time making art, even if it’s bad art at first or even most of the time.
I was encouraged by this passage from Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer:
Have you ever considered that bad art does more for the world than good art? Artists spend more of their lives making bad practice pieces than they do masterworks, particularly at the start. And even when an artist becomes a master, some pieces don’t work out. Still others are somehow just wrong until the last stroke. You learn more from bad art than you do from good art.
Another thing I learned was the importance of ‘filling my well.’ I constantly feel like I don’t have time to write. But I’m not in school anymore, and I don’t have children. I arguably have more free time than I ever have and possibly ever will. Yet I think when I say I don’t have the time I mean I don’t have the energy.
As I mused in my pages one day,
I wonder if sometimes I feel tired after work but it’s just a part of my brain that’s tired, my analytical scientist brain. What if my creative side isn’t tired at all? It might be worth it, when I feel so tired, to read, something to exercise that part of my brain and see if it might not be tired at all, but rather dormant from days of not using it.
During the Artist’s Way, I consciously started reading more again instead of always reaching for the TV remote. Thanks to my artist dates I found myself unwinding in more creative ways—baking or listening to records—or ways more aligned with my values, such as browsing small businesses. My self-care started to feel more nourishing and less self-indulgent. In some cases, these artist dates bore real inspiration, such as for a short piece I’ve now started submitting to literary magazines.
Where time was the real issue, I also started making decisions about priorities. As part of my novel-writing class, I read Mary Oliver’s essay Of Power and Time. In it, she talks about how that social, timekeeper, taskmaster self is the self that interrupts the creative self, and that we have to learn to ignore that self to create.
It is six a.m., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, wherever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
I’m terrified of being “a Meg who thinks she’s a Jo,” which was the podcast Sentimental Garbage’s utterly damning characterization of Rory Gilmore. I’m afraid that I want my nice things, my creature comforts, more than I want to create. I’m afraid that being on medication is too much of a compromise. But I started to carve out more time and create more energy for myself around writing. And eventually I broke through.
The third thing I learned was that unfortunately, in my medicated brain, writing is often going to feel like work. And if I want to keep it in my life, I need to accept that. A musician I love, Julie Byrne, spoke to this in an interview,
While there is mysticism in creativity, there would be times where I was lost in a mind-set of only wanting the process to be mystical. When I was younger I approached writing as something that occurred spontaneously, rather than through perseverance and the raw, honest effort of showing up day in and day out.
I wondered in my journal,
How do I get myself to do things even when I’m not feeling a positive emotion about it? Can I, like, notice I’m not having a positive emotion, acknowledge it, and let go of it? Like “I am not having fun right now. I don’t want to do this. But I know, even though I don’t feel like it right now, that this is important to me. So I’m going to try to do it and maybe the positive emotion will come.” Taking that leap of faith is hard for me. I think the absence of positive emotions actually becomes an anxiety. But sometimes action is a good cure for anxiety.
The first time I finally broke through my block, I set a timer for five minutes and promised myself to really work for five minutes. After those five minutes, I hit the timer again. I did that for about thirty minutes, and at the end of those thirty minutes, I hadn’t quite lost track of time and place, but I still felt proud of what I had accomplished, and I decided that was good enough for me.
I realized that not feeling like I am channeling something does not mean what I create is bad. In lieu of the hypomanic delusion that I am some kind of genius and everything I am writing is amazing, I have had to become comfortable with sitting with an anxiety that everything I’m currently writing might be scrapped. It definitely makes writing harder. But I won’t let it make writing impossible. Even if it means that, as I wrote in my last post, my dislike of my own writing sometimes feels like the only thing standing in the way of being truly happy. As Jamison says in Touched with Fire, “Art is an act of defiance, a rebellion against the constraints of normalcy.” The point of my medication is to keep me from the low lows and the high highs. To make my moods normal. But I refuse to let go of my artistic struggle in favor of full equilibrium. Equilibrium is death.
And so I have carved out more intentional time and energy for creating than I ever have before. I now find myself saying ‘no’ to many social engagements so that I can read and write, or so that I can go to bed early enough to write in the morning. Like Mary Oliver, I leave laundry out for days, unfolded. I don’t always read the news. I’ve become okay with the idea that what others might call my ‘career’ might not progress much further.
The people I talk to most often now are all writers, and it’s not uncommon for me to log at least an hour every day giving feedback on poetry, essays, short pieces, and novels in progress. I’ve even started a writing Slack channel at work. I’ve always dreamed of being in one of those famous literary friendships, like the Inklings or Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. Maybe I’ll look back on this era of my life that way, but short of that, I think it would be cool to spend a month consuming only art that people I know have created.
All of this is to say, a return is often a reversal, but it has been impossible for me to reverse the change to become medicated. In some ways I am a different person now, and it has been a conscious and at times difficult decision to ensure that person is still a writer. I have returned to writing, but I have gone forward, not backward.
Thanks for reading. I hope to publish here more regularly again. Until then!
The honesty and emotion in this piece is incredible. The way you write about your changing relationship with writing is so eloquent and thoughtful. I really connected with the point about the thing you love becoming work. I have struggled with that for many of my passions and honestly have stopped doing some of them because I just could make peace with that. I'm happy to see you are taking a different path!
I have always loved your writing and I'm so happy you shared this with us!
This is really beautiful ❤️ thank you for sharing it!