Go crazy or starve

“I find that in order to write songs the way I did, I have to have an unlimited amount of time to just stare out of the window, to go and do whatever I needed to do.”

- Nick Lowe, from Distinguished Crooner Nick Lowe, in Solo Concert

“If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

- The Gospel of Thomas, v.70, quoted from The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

In a previous post, I said that my writing process demands a certain amount of open time and open space, without which I simply can’t do the work properly. But that’s not the whole story. The creative energy that expresses itself in my writing process is very strong. In many ways, it defines me. I can’t just turn it off or ignore it. There are consequences.

I also have to provide for myself financially, and while my writing process has produced some well-received results, it has yet to provide any significant financial support for me. As a consequence, my life feels like a constant tug-of-war, with a huge horse pulling on each end of the rope. One horse is a writing process that demands lots of time but produces no income, and the other is an income process (i.e., job) that demands lots of time but produces no writing. And I’m the rope.

A while back, a friend told me in an email that she was envious of my writing ability. In my reply, I said:

“Don’t be too envious. A lot of the time it feels more like a curse than a blessing to me because I want and need to be writing and creating daily, but have almost no opportunity to do so. I have to sink the best part of myself into making a living five days a week because the system in which we live considers my real work to be essentially valueless. I’m tortured, miserable, angry, and creatively stifled most of the time as a result. It’s not a fun way to live.”

Now I have to admit that my friend happened to catch me on a particularly frustrating day near the end of one of those maddening workweeks that was taking just about everything I had to get through it. On a lot of days, I would have thanked her for the compliment and left it at that. But the essence of what I said in my reply to her was true.

My situation for the last 20 years has been, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski, “go crazy or starve.” I take the least heinous soul-crushing job I can find to support myself. I work as long as I can, going more and more crazy day by day, until I can’t stand it anymore. Then I quit and go into starve mode and do the things that make my life worth living for as long as I can without actually starving (although I’ve come pretty close a number of times).

Every morning when I wake up and don’t have time to write because some meaningless job is demanding its daily pound of flesh in exchange for a little more survival time, I feel like I’m terminating a pregnancy. It’s absolutely wrenching. I start the day sad, furious, and hopeless. This is one of the main reasons why I stopped writing, or even thinking about writing, for years. I just couldn’t stand being so distraught and angry every single day. It wore me down and turned me inside out. So I blocked the energy and stayed depressed all the time. I felt like a zombie and a traitor to my own life. But I got through the day. And I didn’t starve.

About a year ago, a convergence of important events in my life reignited my creative process, and I’m grateful for that. I feel alive again in ways that I haven’t felt for years, yet I still have the same old problem: most of my days belong to someone else. I have to give myself a creativity abortion every morning to keep food in my belly and a roof over my head. My life is not my own.

The one and only reason I was able to write Iron Man Family Outing is that I hit the “go crazy or starve” point in my job at IBM and I chose starve. I had no thoughts of writing a book; I just knew that I was hours away from a major breakdown and I was going to lose my mind, literally, if I didn’t walk away from that situation, then and there. I’ve been at that point several more times since then and I’ve hit the starve button again to save myself each time.

I’m fifty now and I don’t have the hot skills that used to set me up with jobs whenever I needed money. I might not have wanted those jobs, but I could get ‘em. And the economy is … well, I was gonna say weak, but I think weak is too weak a word for what’s going on right now. So I’m trying to do my writing work and hang on to my income-producing work while somehow keeping my sanity from leaking outta my ears and my soul from fleeing my body in frustration.

I took a one-week break from the job this week in an effort to take some of the edge off the crazy, and it helped. But I also found myself trying to cram as much writing as I could into this tiny little one-week window of open time, so I can’t say it’s been a relaxing week. I finished a couple of pieces (I think … I keep nibbling at them) but it was hard work and I felt like I was on the clock the whole damn time.

No matter. I’m just thankful I had a little time and space to write. And I’m thankful I didn’t have to starve to get it this time.