For a long time I was frustrated. Not depressed, not particularly anxious – just frustrated. Why? Well, that’s what this article is about. Or rather, isn’t about.
I used to unhappily wrestle with big doubts about anything and everything, but largely about people and life. A few weeks before this blog began I cathartically purged myself of doubt, and the effects lasted a good while. In the space of about twenty minutes I typed over 50 difficult and fairly important questions that I didn’t have answers to.
Some of these little gems included:
Does our use of language really affect/control the way we think?
Can we be true to ourselves and the world by choosing beliefs?
Is there any security for an individual?
Is success in an endeavour dependent on commitment to that endeavour and if so how much commitment?
What exactly is logic?
I still didn’t have any answers once I’d typed them all up, but it did me good to put them in a Word document, shove it into the personal development folder and leave it be. Today I can answer many of them, but this isn’t exactly what the article is about.
If you often find yourself feeling down and frustrated and you think it’s because of the ultimate cosmic, psychological and philosophical uncertainty of everything…is it really? I mean, really?
The Writer Suicides
Of course while my frustration was just annoying and on rare occasions quite paralysing, it was nothing compared to what your average Nobel Prize for Literature nominee can go through.
Plath, Hemingway, Thompson, Mishima, Woolf and Sexton: these are a handful of the famous writers who have topped themselves – and these are from the 20th century alone. A New York conference was held in the mid-90s between scholars and writers to explore the links between depression, creativity and suicide. The New York Times doesn’t mention that Mishima arguably wasn’t particularly troubled by life, but the other writers listed definitely were.
‘Kay Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament,” said writers were 10 to 20 times as likely as other people to suffer manic-depressive or depressive illnesses, which lead to suicide more often than any other mental disorders do.’
‘It is not surprising that these mood disorders seem most at home in the artistic mind. “The cognitive style of manic-depression overlaps with the creative temperament,” Ms. Jamison said.’
- http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9F07E7DC1431F937A25752C1A962958260
Yeah…but could it be, gosh I don’t know, that writers spend many hours every day by themselves doing something which is frustratingly difficult, for which they only get appreciation once it’s done, and often for very little money?
Could it also be because creative writing (especially novels and poetry) seems almost designed to make a person miserable? The writer has to critically judge her work too, do 99% of the editing as the manuscript goes through several drafts and then it will probably get rejected by a dozen publishing houses before someone takes it on. And the work itself often requires the writer to be abnormally introverted especially for literary works.
The cognitive overlap stuff is insightful but I think common sense has this phenomenon covered. Writing novels and poetry can be enormously fulfilling but there can be plenty of crap to wade through to get to there.
Tickle-Me-Emo
And if those guys seem like an inadequate example of humanity in general, they are. Hence the Emo clique of teenagers –an oh-so-marginally less talented and much larger group than the literary elite.
I don’t mean to belittle the plight of angsty teens (well…not to any really mean level :P) because their struggles with depression and philosophical quandaries are the same that geniuses can go through. Geniuses aren’t special for it and neither is your average My Chemical Romance junkie. Claiming that Virginia Woolf’s anguish is any grander than some ordinary 16-year-old’s is like claiming that drug-use is acceptable for artists and rock stars but not for everyone else (a double standard that the media regularly promotes).
I’ve discussed the source of teenage unhappiness pretty thoroughly. It boils down to teenagers being biologically out of whack but how, often not understanding this, they wrongly put the blame on external things in their lives and believe that if they do xyz external thing they’ll be happy again – and this only aggravates their unhappiness.
I mentioned in a follow-up article that the best and probably only way for teenagers to deal with their biology screwing with their moods is to focus on things other than the mood itself.
The tricky bit is distinguishing a useless and dangerous ‘this will make everything okay’ action from a helpful ‘this is a good distraction’ action. Getting laid regularly, for example, could be either.
The emo/angsty/gothic/whatever teen becomes that way because his hormones are making him unhappy but he think it’s because he’s discovered the universe is cruel, unknowable and random.
In fact…
Writers can find themselves overwhelmed by the misery of the human condition (or whatever) because they make a living from writing it into the lives of their characters (as all good stories are about problems) and their jobs suck at times. Teenagers can find themselves overwhelmed by the mysterious wrongs of existence because they’re hormonal stock exchanges with tonnes of free time.
Show me someone who claims to be feeling down because of the unknowable and potential meaningless of it all, and I’ll show you a liar. Because that stuff never makes anyone miserable: it’s just a facade you put on the real cause for being unhappy. It’s putting a face on your unhappiness.
So, what’s really bothering you?
For me it was just hesitancy. All that time ago I wrapped myself up in all these grand doubts and prevented myself from just shrugging them off and getting on with what makes me happy. Shrinks can call this self-sabotage or a fear of success or whatever – essentially it was me not doing what would make me happy because I wouldn’t let myself.
Having answers to the big questions is an important worthwhile pursuit but that will involve you taking action. And good action. Not writing Booker-prize winning fiction about how much life sucks, not cutting yourself to the tune of the latest mascara-wearing band and not sitting around unable to get on with something useful because you don’t feel certain of anything.
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