Growing Pains: Getting on With Things
Navigating mental health while trying to be a writer in the world
Hi, and welcome back to The Archive. This essay is slightly different to my usual content and is a bit more personal. But I thought it worth writing about because some people might relate to what I’m going through and thinking about.
Enjoy <3
I’ve taken to writing in my notebook when I’m feeling anxious, documenting moments of weight so that they feel less heavy. This is my version of ‘getting on with things’. A constant stream of noise keeps me occupied – YouTube, podcasts, or the same song played on repeat for hours – until the incessant beating in my chest finally subsides.
Right now, Kujenga’s latest album is playing on a constant loop, at least until my headphones die. Then I’ll play it out loud on my iPhone’s speakers, placed above a hollow section of my wooden desk so that the sound resonates better.
I usually never write with music playing, but things have changed. These days, my mind is so busy that it can only be distracted by multitasking. Someone once told me that multitasking is bad for your brain, but if it keeps the demons at bay, I’ll gladly indulge in overstimulation. It’s a form of numbing I’ve learned to forgive myself for.
Nevermind that Kujenga’s In the Wake is truly excellent and I’d rather have their genius playing over and over in my ears than be confronted by punishing silence.
It’s a Thursday and the week is feeling as though it’s inching by, the minutes and hours becoming agonisingly long the longer I spend alone. A damning thought pushes to the front of the line: I just want to talk to someone.
Not my landlady, though. She could talk the world into the next apocalypse. I’m always hearing about what’s happening in her son’s life, the state of the country, possible water cuts, her trips to and from the shops. I guess she and I are the same in that way – we both crave the comfort of conversation, and she ambushes me whenever she can. Despite myself, I always stay to listen.
Mondays and Tuesdays are the hardest for me to bear. The silence stretches around me, allowing my brain to engulf me in an endless torrent of what if’s and what now’s.
I’ve been recently diagnosed with another scary acronym that I’m learning to deal with. If you were following my blog a while ago when it was still on Medium, you might recall me mentioning something similar in an essay called Living Creatively: Volume II. This time around, it’s a brand new diagnosis with its own set of unique circumstances. Again, it’s not ADHD as I’d suspected, but something else that makes a lot more sense. I’m seeing a specialist a week from now and I find myself pruning my feathers – I want her to like me, I want to be her favourite patient, perfectly fucked up in just the right way. I’ll have to pay an exorbitant fee to prove to myself that what I’m going through is real and not some elaborate trick I’ve played on my therapist of three years.
So, it's a Thursday afternoon and I’m playing Kujenga’s new album over and over because I’m afraid of what will happen when the music stops. I’m not sure how to be ok with not being ok.
I went for coffee with a friend earlier and it gave me minimal relief, but only for about as long as it takes to drink a small cappuccino. Now I’m crying on the front steps of my cottage apartment after putting my laundry up, and I’m thinking about how ridiculous this all is, how ridiculous it is to be alive in the world. It’s the most beautiful day in early summer and I’m listening to one of the best albums ever made, but I can’t stop crying.
I keep wondering when I’ll stop teething, when these growing pains will finally ease up. I guess it’s up to me to decide – I have to ride this wave, even if it means getting sucked into the deep more than once. I just have to keep swimming, like Dory says in Finding Nemo. Just keep swimming.
There’s something poetic about teardrops warping the pages of my notebooks, but I don’t want to remain in this state of limbo forever. The tortured artist archetype is woefully overdone and I refuse to find my equilibrium here, treading water. My head often feels like an echo-chamber, but with locks on all the doors, the key cruelly discarded. Another thought takes its place at the front of the line: I just want to be let out.
It’s not all doom and gloom – I’ve been catching sight of the shoreline and I’ve even stepped foot on dry ground a few times. I have these brief moments of clarity and productivity, and I try to take advantage of them as much as possible, even though I have to admit that things have never really been this bad before. I’m ‘high functioning’, so my gentle chaos doesn’t really show unless I decide to let my guard down. Or unless I decide to write about it on the internet. I can cook for myself most nights, I remember to buy toilet paper, I do my laundry regularly. Things are fine, in some ways.
This new acronym came as a surprise to me and the people I’ve told, but it makes more sense the longer I consider it. And I feel more empowered to do something about it, now that I know what’s been keeping me up at night. The ghost that seemed to be haunting me has finally shown itself, and I’m slowly collecting the tools I need to deal with it in a constructive way. In the last essay I wrote about dealing with diagnoses of this kind, I used the metaphor of a treadmill held together with duct tape, and I think it applies here as well. My brain is just trying to keep me going, forcing me to put one foot in front of the other.
In relation to writing, I’ve been feeling demotivated in certain areas of my work, and highly motivated in others. My notebook is filling up at an alarming rate, the pages now blooming with word vomit, musings and the like. Thankfully, my day job has been slow and the gentle chaos of the past few weeks has had time to swirl around me without being too disruptive. For this, I am eternally grateful. But it made me rethink the way I’ve been going about my life lately - I knew I needed a change.
As part of my ‘getting on with things’ mentality, I decided to spend a few days per week on campus, working in the libraries and visiting the art museum there. It has worked surprisingly well, which reconfirms my suspicion that I’m someone who works best when my environment is in flux. When I stay at home, holed up in my cottage apartment for too long, my motivation stagnates and I become sedentary. So, I decided to move my workspace elsewhere, to refuse my instinct to isolate when things get bad and do the scary thing of stepping outside.
I have also begun to factor small routines into my daily life to give me some semblance of order. When I want to write, I light a candle and place it on my desk. When I’m feeling particularly frazzled, I listen to the music on my party playlist and dance around. When I’m overwhelmed, I return my attention to my breath and gently tap pressure points in my chest and forehead, like my mother taught me to do when I was little. These mindful practices feel like little tokens of magic and are as comforting as they are effective.
I still struggle to concentrate for long periods of time and my mind is constantly in overdrive. But I’m making an effort to slot myself back into place. And doing the scary thing is sometimes exactly what I need to shock me back to the present, to remind myself that I’m alive, and that the world won’t wait for me to wake up.
Currently reading:
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
Broken Light by Joanne Harris
