Last night I argued with my parents until I was triggered to tears; this morning we all woke up and apologized to each other in a fit of guilt and over-sentimentality. I now sit here blinking at the cursor, and I am a newborn baby bird. I have no feathers and I am pink and still covered in amniotic fluid.
I came to this realization only this morning, the first of June, something that I in truth should have realized a long time ago. Still, I find myself being grateful that at least I came to the realization at all. In the depths of January, shrouded in the Pacific Northwest rainclouds and buried in some chapter of some economics textbook, I looked to the future and imagined myself to be a great albatross. My wingspan would be among the largest of all flying birds and I would have no fears and I would unleash all my harboured potential. (All of this would coincide with my graduation.)
None of these things happened. Here is what happened. I graduated, and then I became addicted to social media and my brain stopped working. This is not a poetic thing to admit. As an artist, you want people to think you are mysterious and interesting and far above social media and spend all your time reading Proust and perusing art galleries. But despite our pretentiousness and tendency to inflate our self-importance, our brains are the same as everyone else.
I would start a book off my Goodreads list and within minutes get antsy and pick up my phone. I would open the doc for my next fic and realize I still needed to think of a transition scene and get annoyed and pick up my phone. I would wake up in the morning and pick up my phone. I would... constantly be on my fucking phone.
The problem with dosing yourself every moment of every day with the colourful little pixels in your back pocket is that it becomes a crutch. You can battle boredom with it, but you can also stave off uncomfortable emotions with it. You can pass time, but you can also sit in bed to scroll for a few minutes and the next thing you know it's 8 p.m. and you've done nothing all day. And then you feel like a lazy, good-for-nothing nasty little troll living under a bridge. These are all really nice and wonderful feelings to have.
What has exacerbated this whole situation is the fact that it has coincided with what I am calling my writer-coming-of-age. This is not a coming of age in a romantic sense. This is a coming of age where life hits me over the head with a rubber mallet and lets me know that I am the same as the rest and nothing will come without hard work.
I think I've said before, probably a couple of years ago during my to haunt a heart psychosis that writing is the only thing that comes easy to me. And it really was the truth. I look back to my late teens/first few years of my twenties and reminisce on how I used to write until the tips of my fingers were smoking with the exertion of it. Of course, none of the pieces I wrote back then were critically acclaimed literary fiction but there was something so special about how I had a creative well inside me, and I had direct access to it with a spout that I could turn on and off whenever I pleased. I think my well is now having plumbing issues. But no such special plumbers exist to fix the problem. Just look around you. Everyone's creative well has plumbing issues.
When you are so young (mind you, I am still young) I think you are so in-tune with your emotions and privileged with the ability to not have to worry about much more than yourself. And that unleashes a pretty ferocious beast within you, one that can write, edit, and publish 100k words in 4 months. You're also pretty stupid. You don't know anything about prose or pace or tone and you don't care. That only feeds the beast, makes it stronger.
But then you get a couple years older, and you think yourself a serious writer, so you read the theory and the classics. You then quickly realize you aren't as good as you want to be and everything comes to a grinding halt. Because now, you're second guessing every aspect of your plot. You write a first draft and you can't even read it back because of how terrible it is and you distract yourself from the anger and anxiety by scrolling on TikTok for 7 hours. Consume others' thoughts for long enough, you stop coming up with thoughts on your own and your creative well (the one that already has plumbing issues) effectively dries up. There you go, you've just created your very own beautiful disaster.
This is my writer-coming-of-age because I am deeply unspecial in this prognosis. So many writers have gone through it. I'm almost annoyed I'm the same as the rest.
Anyway, to sum up these past few months- my destructive perfectionism fuelled my unwillingness to write, which in turn fuelled my phone addiction, which in turn fuelled the death of my creative mojo, which in turn... You can see where this is going.
The fact that I even sit here writing this is because I did something I likely should have done months ago. I deleted all the social medias I was addicted to and forced myself to be bored and have thoughts of my own. All of a sudden, I reckon with my emotions in truth and argue with my parents until tears.
I am now a newborn baby bird. I'm pink and moist with amniotic fluid, but at least I feel like myself again. I am not a Great albatross that can glide for hours across the sea without effort, but at least I exist.
from bird by bird - anne lamott
