Welcome back! Three years isn't much of a hiatus, is it?
A lot has changed since my last post. In short (because this isn't a blog about my life), I started and finished a graduate program in business administration and lived for two years on a mountain with a community of Franciscan friars. Now I'm living with relatives while I look for a job in a non-profit or service cause.
I never intended to take a break from writing, and I never stopped thinking of myself as a writer. I can't even say that life got in the way; after all, I've never been busier than when I was an undergraduate, and I did far more unprompted writing during that time than in the rest of my life combined. Yet graduate school was a desert experience for me: I had few friends, and most of my energy was divided between physically exercising, discerning my future, and the yet-undiscovered experience of studying. And the Franciscans run an intentional community, which means that although I was never bound by their vows, to participate fully in their lifestyle I needed to focus my creative energy on hospitality.
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Although this isn't a blog about my life, I need to talk about my return to writing in order to re-invite you into your own genius. And to do this, I need to get personal and messy by talking about my own demons.
I believe there are two kinds of demons we face every day. You can call them vices, addictions, illnesses, obstacles, challenges, opportunities, pitfalls, or whatever works for your own experience; I prefer to personify them. The first kind are the ones that will be with us our whole lives. They show up in different ways depending on our situations. Most importantly, however difficult they make life for us, they are not intrinsically bad, for they are part of us. They do harm primarily when we pretend they don't exist or try to kill them, but we can accomplish great good by embracing them.*
My own include perfectionism, loneliness (especially for intimacy), and self-doubt.
The second are exterior and not intrinsic to us. In fact, we often use them to try to drown out the first kind of demons, the ones that are the parts of ourselves we don't like. They should be either moderated or eliminated. They include coping mechanisms like substance addictions, promiscuity, and the pursuit of tangible achievements such as money.
My own include procrastination, internet overuse, and obsession with achievement. When I indulge in too much of even one of these, my writing crashes faster than a state trooper in a Blues Brothers movie.
The first two go hand in hand. To illustrate, here's a list of what I've done on my computer while writing this post:
-helped a friend revise his Magic: the Gathering deck.
-watched six action movie trailers.
-looked up Mass times for a local church.
-mapped this morning's run.
-mapped the total area I've run while living here, then catalogued it with my other running statistics.
-checked my email.
-volunteered for a walk-a-thon.
-checked my LinkedIn page.
-checked the twenty-one webcomics I follow, then read a handful more pages of webcomics.
-read an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man.
-read an issue of The Fantastic Four.
-researched Project A119 (this one's actually quite interesting, especially if you like history).
-read an article about marriage.
-read an article about a human stress index.
-read a list of stupidest posts on Twitter.
-read a list of celebrities who look like Pokémon.
-read a list of stupid bosses.
-played a set of trivia quizzes.
-researched the answers I got wrong on said quizzes.
-listened to Christian rock on Youtube.
-listened to rock that is decidedly not very Christian on Youtube.
-watched a short cartoon.
-read about Hiyao Miyazaki.
-updated my blog profile.
-taught myself how to count to twenty in sign language.
-played about thirty games of Su Doku on "evil" mode.
-checked my Facebook profile about eight thousand times, wherein I saw exactly three notifications and two messages, one of which was about those movie trailers and Magic: the Gathering cards.
And if that doesn't look to you like a problem, I did all this in the time it took me to write this post's second paragraph (about twenty-two hours). You might have other coping methods, but with smart phones becoming ever more ubiquitous, I doubt I'm in the minority with this issue, especially among my generation.
As for obsession with achievement, notice the fact that I can quantify what I've learned today.
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In my confused, teenage years, writing itself was a coping mechanism, through which I could order my thoughts and feelings on my own time and in my own medium, where they made more sense than they did when I was put on the spot or had to conform to values I didn't understand. When my emotions were well integrated, writing became a powerful way to process them. When they were poorly integrated, my writing flagged and I suffered what I've come to know as "dark moods," where it was difficult for me to focus on anything but a yearning for intimacy.
My writing hiatus was accompanied by a hiatus of this dynamic. This owed itself to a commitment of my spiritual time toward hospitality and fraternity, as well as an extremely difficult relationship which made all intimacy significantly less savory.
Now that I'm back in what we may call a "non-intentional community" (better known as a "suburb"), my balance between creative effusiveness and anxious yearning has begun to return. It fits to consider this a vacillation between extroversion and introversion: sometimes I long for company, while other times I long for solitude. And while I think the rigors of community life have given me more maturity, still I find myself returning to coping mechanisms like idle internet surfing, which, were I better integrated, surely I wouldn't need. Would I?
Willpower or discipline can certainly help, but I think the key to the healing which each person needs uniquely is balance. So here are, in my opinion, the key elements of balance of which writing is a cornerstone in my life:
Human needs: I tell this to college students whenever I can. I was never the sharpest tool in the shed, but I got good grades because I was one of the only students in my school who got a good night's sleep most nights of the week, exercised regularly, and have still never tasted Ramen noodles. Maslow figured it out long enough ago; when our other needs are met, we can focus our attention on the mysteries that make us human.
Work and play: Work allows you to create a positive difference in your community, while play allows you to explore yourself with a different set of consequences. I tend to enjoy labor-intensive work and mentally-intensive play, so writing is play for me, but it flourishes only when I can also be of service to others through work.
Company and solitude: Too little socializing can drive anyone crazy, but often so can too much. Because writing is a solitary experience for most people, it should be complemented by regular human interaction, especially intimacy. However, I've found it can also help to process loneliness by creating communication. Loved ones can also help us with the creative process by discovering our blind spots.
The familiar and the strange: Perhaps it's the fantasy writer in me, but I find something romantic in exploring new places and meeting new people. Yet few of us find it easy to appreciate both novelty and familiarity. A balance between the two of these is essential for knowing your writing material. You'll need to have characters you know like your own heart, and you'll want them to be exposed to things that surprise them, or your story isn't going to convince me.
Standards and forgiveness: This is the most important balancing act because it pervades all the others at every moment. As a perfectionist, I find it especially difficult. I want to live a balanced life, but what happens when I don't? What happens when I can't? (Impossible!) My tendency is never to give myself room to put all the standards down and laugh at myself before picking them back up. It probably has a lot to do with my long hiatus from writing. Other personalities might skew the opposite way, and be too lenient on themselves, lacking the discipline which balance often takes.
I have deliberately failed to make this list exhaustive; it's here for you as artists and human beings to pick it up and play with it. It is a result of my embracing perfectionism, loneliness, and self-doubt, rather than running from them or denouncing them as evil. It is also an example of the baring of the imperfect self that needs to happen for true creativity to awaken. After all, if we understood life perfectly, what would be left to write about?
*I recommend Helen Palmer's book on the Enneagram personality model, or any trustworthy book on the subject, on the matter of our lifelong behavioral biases. Specifically to the Enneagram, I'd dissuade you from taking a questionnaire and pinning a type on yourself without reading further; most questionnaires I've taken have gauged me inaccurately.
