January 22nd, 2010 by Neal

SUCKED. The Fear had me. Hard to describe to anyone else. The worst thing about The Fear is that it 1) Cannot be described to anyone else in a way they will understand 2) Involves a great deal of the mind saying you’re fine and should be producing when really, you need nothing but Two and A Half Men or something equally brainless, maybe a shot of booze, maybe a goddamned bike ride or long walk. Not that it worked yesterday, anyway. Anyway, point of bullet point is that your brain recoils in horror, rebels, and tells you things that aren’t, in fact, logical or with point. 3) It is usually a product of paranoia and is unpredictable given its similarity to laziness and lack of corollary (often) with exhaustion. It grips you and makes you second-guess things eternally, everything, and I am absolutely positive it is the result of the beaten-dog syndrome I seem to have whereby I can’t trust anyone since I’ve been hit so many times for trying to do normal good things like eat, clothe myself, or be kind.

Usually it comes with a bout of sleep loss, random crying, and the screams. Last night was fortunate. I had new shoes and new socks and a few things to cheer me up, so it only came with a few jags and I went right to sleep, mostly because I realized the day a loss and calmed myself with six hours of reading. I still lost most of a day of work. Good to note, even the worst of the jags now come with about 1,000 words, which is enough to give a college student the runs.

At any rate, the reason I share these deeply personal things is that they are a necessary part of the process, often, and in the end, when you come through them, they often inform the work in ways, making them better. Sometimes they make them worse, but usually, if you bork a whole chapter, you find one line in there from your day you “lost” that is one of the better ones of the rewrite.

I woke up today feeling much better, and managed this thereby:

I can now go into the weekend happy, and let all the bad shit go. That’s as it should be. And now I can go for walks to vent it out, thanks to the shoes. That’s an undoubtedly good thing.

There is something fucked up to be said for how wrong artistry can be when one can produce two novels in a year, successfully survive a barrage of atrocities, and even manage savings, and then immediately go into a spiral fear of failure. I think it’s something in the brain chemistry, part of what makes people write. Then again, many, many people are successful writers who never experience such things, so maybe it’s a product of dysfunction. And maybe, ironically, the thing that makes me wonder why I am not more successful than I am at the age of thirty is the very thing that has stopped me from being a success at thirty, my paranoia, my dysfunction in myself from the way I’ve lived. The Fear.

But like I’m always told when I point out that I’m afraid of being a bad father because I’m worried I’ll fuck it up, and as I advise others, that fear alone is the first step most others don’t dare to take, and thereby, perhaps, I will be able to triumph.

Hope springs anew.