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Monday, October 7, 2013

Why I "Novel" - Part Dos (2)

About seven and a half years ago, I had just graduated from college with a business degree and I was working my first (and last) marketing job, which was a very stressful experience. Lots of stress. Constant stress. Fresh out of college, I was overwhelmed and hated waking up every day to go do this stuff.

And so I began to fall apart. My downfall commenced with a nagging worry, of the sort that I’d been troubled with many times in the past and somehow managed to swat away after weeks or months. This current fear, however, was a little stronger, just a bit more intense—making it more believable and convincing that it was the truth. And so this worry persisted and festered, very quickly snowballing into another fear as I rushed to judgment and made a false connection that resulted in another, even more debilitating delusion. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I sunk further and further down into this void of delusion until I’d lost control of my mind, my body, and my life. Every basic comprehension—about myself and the world—fell away; everything became horribly confusing, and every experience became quite humiliating and thoroughly devastating.

Nothing made sense anymore; I had no idea what was going on. Everything in my life was terrifying. My mind had unraveled seemingly overnight. For a general clarification of about this malaise, let this suffice: what had once been “down” was now “up” and vice versa. To survive, I was grasping at straws, grasping at anything that made sense or could make sense. I became more and more scared as fear and doubt spread into all aspects of my life until I became unsure of the reality of any little thing. Amid the wreckage, I didn’t know where to turn or what to do. Peace had been taken from me, and I couldn’t find it again. I went through a great deal of trauma, and I was in a lot of emotional / spiritual pain with no idea of what was going on. Very quickly I went from being a fairly outgoing person to someone who could no longer function socially or in any way whatsoever.

Through a constant pounding of humiliation and trauma, I was humbled until I felt lower than the dust and the worms beneath. I couldn’t stand to be around people or friends because I was so scared of myself and of them. I couldn’t do my job; I humiliated myself, my employers, my friends. What good was I? What did I have to live for? Why would I want to live like this?

Throughout my life, I had put off the urge to write since I considered it to be pointless; I didn’t have the confidence to start and would rather spend my free time playing video games to help deter the constant nagging, the pain, and turmoil of OCD. (Yeah, I can be quite the video-gameaholic. Noveling has been my 12 Step Program.) This time, the urge to write came back stronger, and I was finally ready to follow-through and obey: I was desperate for any outlet to vent my frustration and terror and self-loathing. I had been made to listen at last.

When I lost my job (How could I work when I couldn’t concentrate or contribute?), I was forced to move in with my parents and proceeded to live as a virtual recluse for two years. I didn’t get help because I didn’t think there was any help to be had. I didn’t consider the possibility that I could be mentally ill, thinking that what I was going through was just some sort of personal crisis that was a little more intense than the crises I’d had many times before.

Throughout all this distress and change (trying to work while extremely ill, losing my job, and moving), I turned to noveling as a drowning man would turn to a life raft or preserver and hold onto it tightly. Noveling was the only thing that could keep me afloat. The art of piecing together a novel made perfect sense to me when nothing else did. I could comprehend it when I wasn’t able to keep a firm grasp of the most mundane, basic concepts.

Noveling gave me peace, made me feel good about myself. It just felt right from the start, like it was something I should have been doing all along. A perfect fit. It was as though I’d slipped on a nice party dress that accentuated my curves. . . .

(Uh, please forget you read that. This is supposed to be a serious post. Focus, Josh. Focus!)

I novelled for my own salvation I suppose. I novelled before I was diagnosed, before I had therapy and learned mindfulness techniques to help me hang onto inner tranquility. It provided relief when nothing else could. A novel was something I could dive into and lose myself in. For stretches of time, I could forget myself and find safety from my own brain in realms of fantasy, where I was free to let everything go. There I could work through my demons, express what I was feeling, and show how I hurt. I could offload every dark emotion I was enduring and throw it on the back of something / someone else. For a time, I could be free of pain, and that meant everything to me.

This immense passion for noveling has only grown over the last seven years or so as I’ve gone from total recluse to struggling to rejoin society—a process and prospect I’m still not comfortable with and never will be. It’s much easier for me to sit at my computer for hours at a time and write rather than get out and be social. Considering how uncomfortable I am even around family members, going to a party and sitting there with strangers isn’t easy—it’s torture really. Needless to say, torture is not my idea of fun.

If I wasn’t able to novel, I’d have nothing; I would feel like I was less than nothing. The crafting of a high-quality piece of work has given me self-esteem, which has helped me in turn to have the needed courage when facing OCD obsessions / compulsions and social anxiety fears. Just finishing a novel showed me that I can do it, that I can make something of myself, that I don’t have to be a drain on others. There is something I am really good at, something I can do for a living at a time when I can’t hang onto employment or find work.

Because of mental illness, each day of my life finds a new way to provide me with fresh misery. For me, living isn’t fun, but writing is. When I’m able to sit in front of a computer every day and launch myself into the shoes of another character and live and breathe in their world, I am able to forget all about my own and my existence; I’m free to create whatever I wish. In those moments, I am liberated from my own brain, and it is wonderful. The experience is rather magical, transformative, as I become this other person: I can see right through them and understand everything there is to understand. I am able to see them for who they truly are, and this relieves some of my loneliness.

This will sound hokey or cheesy, but writing is my soul, and my soul is writing. Everything I have goes into my novels. I agonize over individual words and sentence structure. If something doesn’t “sound” right, I can’t leave it alone until it’s perfect.  Writing is everything to me, for I have nothing else to live for. I don’t want anything else to live for. I will never get married or have a family of my own, and that is fantastic. I am thrilled about that. I may never have a lot of money, and that is also fantastic. I could care less about any of this. All I care about is my writing and my spiritual progress (just trying to be a good person and improving myself). That’s as simple as I can make my life, and I am grateful for it. I am grateful that I am so ill that my perspective has been forcibly shifted from the temporal to the eternal, to what’s really important in life, to what life is about. It is a blessing that I am afforded an eternal perspective that career-mongers so often miss as they chase advancement and a dollar.

The art of scribbling down my thoughts and creating works of art called novels has quite literally saved my life. I can’t overemphasize that enough, and I don’t spout that out glibly. I mean it. Noveling is everything to me. It is the only way I can have any happiness in this dreadful life of mine. It has given me a purpose when there wouldn’t be one otherwise. Without the sweet beauty found in this work, I’d have no motivation to live, nothing to push me to be healthy. I’d be obsessed with the desire to die because it is extremely hard living like this. I have no dignity, and I am either pitied or ridiculed; I have nothing to be proud of except for that which I have created. In general, the life I lead is an embarrassment, a failure.

Lest you misunderstand me, I don’t talk about being mentally ill or talk about this desolate life of mine for pity or sympathy. I don’t ever want to get those sorts of comments or hear such words from people: it embarrasses me to earn this sort of attention when suffering on a much grander scale is rampant throughout the world. I just want to talk openly about mental illness and my experience with it so others don’t feel like they have to hide in the shadows or be ashamed of their struggle. We are too often embarrassed by our symptoms, and we are afraid of those being noticed or seen because we fear the judgments of others and of being shunned from society. So, we work really hard to hide all the evidence and all traces leading to the evidence. That’s why so many around me for so many years had no idea or didn’t suspect I was sick until the illnesses reached their breaking point and came to the forefront to dominate my life in a dramatic way. I speak about my experiences with these disorders because I don’t want anyone to feel as alone as I have throughout this ordeal, and I want to show others who suffer that our lives can still be worth something, that we can still accomplish much of great value, that our suffering isn’t meaningless.

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