Every time I walk into tango, I am tempted to walk right back out. I’m anxious. I feel dread. Of what I don’t know. I only know this: In any situation, anything could happen.
I suppose there’s a name for it. I suppose there’s a drug. (One of my writer friends encourages me to try better living through chemistry. “I’m on ---,” she says. “I walk around thinking, ‘This is what normal is like!’ ”)
Lots of writers are jittery. It's the curse of the overactive imagination. The absurdly inventive graphic artist Robert Crumb has been described as a nervous hamster. William Styron used to write like a madman; he's written no decent fiction since he started on Prozac.
A coil must be tense before it can spring.
That said, reading old posts even I must wonder: What kind of nutjob deliberately walks into her own dark wood …
… four times a week?
There are people who skydive without checking their chutes.
There are people who step between a man’s fist and his wife.
There are people who bang hammers on nuclear warheads.
There are people who free climb, free dive, free love, freely speak up for the lost.
We are adventurers of the present.
I have never been able to pass up a lion’s den without sticking my head in.
Tango tonight, 7 p.m.
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2 comments:
Hmmmm I think it's a bit much to compare being nervous about a dance lesson (or anxiety in general) to needing to be dosed up on antidepressants to feel normal. I've been in that place, I now take SSRIs to feel, not happy, not calm, just to FEEL.
I imagine this is probably experimental jottings for your book or whatever, so I thought I should point it out. I make jokes to friends all the time that they should try the chemical cosh, but it is a joke.
Lewis Wolpert is probably the only writer to actually express what it is really like without romanticising it. If you are truly "unwell" the correct prescription of chemicals actually enable you to function and to be creative.
Yes, SSRI is surely an overreaction to tango butterflies!
As you say, it's only a chemical cosh joke. Also, a writing technique, using overstatement to put the butterflies in proper perspective.
My writer friend who takes an SSRI would say she takes it because she feels too much. Same coin, two sides?
Styron has an unstinting, unromanticized (and beautiful) book, Darkness Visible, about his losing fight with depression and his gratitude for finally finding Prozac.
There's a dangerous and romantic notion (popular among college sophomores) that you have to be crazy to write brilliantly, and if you are not that by nature, you should make yourself so.
But Flaubert said "Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."
That's my motto. Now if I could write like Flaubert...
Thanks for leaving the comment. Good points, well made. Best, OHD.
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