There's a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness….anon

There's a fine line between a hobby and a mental illness….anon

She'd known all her life what she had to do, which was to write. But the road map to a life of minor seclusion -that would allow her to filter out the phone, the birds, the blue skies, the cooking and cleaning- was under her bed all those years, collecting lint and dust. And she knew that to prostrate and stretch that coughingly low into the furthest dark corners to retrieve the map, would only be to commit herself to new anxieties. Which would include, but not be limited to, a litany of mundane frustrations. First on the list, would be locating her reading glasses --and not the ones with the broken stem, on top of the radio in the kitchen-- but the other ones, which she'd forgotten she'd left on the back of the the toilet seat top. And if and when she retrieved her eyesight, she would then be obliged to find her ADD meds (so that thoughts would line up nicely instead of leapfrogging)--but she could only do that, after she awoke more, with a cup of latte; but not until she could figure out how to make the foaming spout work, after she fished the directions out of the box which had been put out by the garbage. It would be a messy, dirty, humiliating ordeal, not to mention time-consuming. By then it would be at least 3 PM. She would have completely forgotten not only what that brilliant sentence was that was to send her fingers flying across the computer (after she figured out and disconnected the extension that was causing it to crash). But also forgotten, would be the day of the week and the year in which she was trying to make a living, while barely achieving, just living. So it didn't make sense to do any of those things which would interrupt her muse and herself from having a grand ole' time (besides fixing her computer, after she found the phone number for Microsoft Word Support, after she found her registration number, after she called her step father to see if he'd kept a copy of it when he'd lent her the Word CD).

Now, she knew, all of her writing life, what she needed besides "downers" for sleeping, after she would finally kick into full gear at 5 PM: an editor. And of course, a coach; in order for her to keep her friends who had been dragged into fulfilling those roles, when her mind and mouth wouldn't shut up. That was what would happen after the coffee and Dexedrine bolted her into "the real world" that she happened to dread more than death itself.
She couldn't afford an editor, however, what with her small disability payments for her rather imposing disability.
Of course, she also needed to go back to therapy, to complete her work on not finishing anything in her entire life of promises and disappointments to her mother. (But wasn't that more her mother's agenda than her own? And didn't she need to stop being so co-dependent? And didn't that mean that for the sake of her ego, she had to continue to procrastinate instead. Or wasn't she supposed to over-ride her ego? But hadn't she just written a piece of psychobabble about the need to acknowledge it rather than deny it?)
She knew she needed an editor and perhaps a therapist. If indeed she needed a therapist it was probably not because her mother intimated this, but because she felt she did have the sensibility in spite of what everyone thought, to know that it was not wise to use her friends or mother in that way. (Not when her mother would e-mail back responses to her writing like, "I could take it from Erica Jong, but not from my own daughter!" Although she should have been flattered, was flattered-- down under all the weight of her fatigue-- there was flattery, along with the map, another pair of broken reading glasses and that book from the library that she'd denied having ever checked out).

Well, although she was flattered way down under the ifs and buts; in the suffocating dark there ---flattered in the same manner in which she knew that her father really had thought she was smart and special-- her mother's replies typically made her feel defiant which triggered those one liners, like the one she'd co-opted from Tony's refrigerator door that read, "…if it's not one thing it's your mother". But--and this was hard to admit-- the good thing about the annoyances of mothers and insignifiecant others, was that they inevitably pulled her thoughts into corners she'd rather have not gone, but where, none-the-less, she'd needed to go simply because they were useable: they provided writing material.

But the map that was to help her through the chaos (including her cleaning mentor's agenda who defined chaos as "Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome", the web guru she had mixed feelings about since she didn't want to have anyone over)--getting it, was the problem, had been all her life since the map would have been simpler to read, let alone clean, when she was eight, when school got in the way of her education in life. She knew that creativity was nothing that a teacher or mother could give to a child. Rather (she'd write once she got rolling) it was a "lifestyle of surrendering to energies-in-motion (e-motions) that pass through bodies, stimulating brains and hands".

She was angry that the teacher, the mother, the father insignificant other, and brother (to whom she wasn't speaking) all discouraged (even punished) those inspirations, those gifts she'd been given from the angels or muses or Gods, as defined by her changing, beliefs, as defined by her bi-chemically induced and chemically-controlled moods.

She enjoyed blaming the chemistry thing on the fact that her mother, father and teachers had constantly interrupted and diverted her sessions with the muse in their attempts to re-wire her brain in order to re-route it to pick up and relay frequencies of The Mundane: the real world of things, in which she felt crowded out completely; a fake reality of commerce worshipers wherein she could never figure out her place, because there simply was none.

So of course she'd gone mad well before the age of computers: At sixteen, she went stark raving angry, was taken to a psychiatrist, and told the man he hadn't a thought of his own to share and what good was he, having willfully amputated the Goddess-given ability to hear and speak his own mind; told him she didn't find him any inspiration at all and thus couldn’t possibly be helped-- not by him, not by her parents, not by anyone except a good hard fuck from her boyfriend (he- age eighteen). She felt ready to leave the world, with its constant intrusions into her golden "mine", agitations from the world of the worldly that served to convolute her soul and splinter her mind.

Yes, she had at times felt suicidal. Not like Sylvia Plath, at the height of her success, looking down in terror to how hard she could fall. No, she'd never known any success, really, yet she felt like a famous and rich novelist when she wrote, nonetheless. Remembering her dream of being handed a small blue volume of writing and seeing that the author's name had been her own. It hadn't been a best seller by a long shot but the man, who asked her when the next book would be coming out, reminded her that it had sold and the world was waiting.

But what I am trying to get at, after 5 hours of sleep from my spinning head and endless serial dreams, is that the roadmap towards what would eventually be her success--whether it would end up as a print-out in the hands of her grandchildren or be printed in Mademoiselle like Sylvia's poems-- wound through many paths marked "Failure"…. So that by midlife she'd have no choice to do anything other than to take her meds and sit home and write…which suited her just fine….