Writing, happiness, and why the two never go together
Yury Shpakovski
People keep telling me that a happy artist is a stagnant artist. A content writer is a writer with nothing important to say. I have no idea if happiness makes you lazy. I was born discontent. And I don't mean that in some cute philosophical way. When your earliest memories circle around the neuroses typical of people far bigger than you with far more to worry about, being content is relative.
I wasn't a fearful child, just a wary and meticulous one. I had counting games and rituals that couldn't be broken. I always looked for patterns in everything, from the number of windows in a room to the arrangement of pictures on the wall. There were colors to be avoided and words that couldn't be said, because the clunky way their consonants were arranged irritated me. Every so often, yes, I became convinced I had some mysterious jungle illness and thought I would surely die. After my third or fourth non-existent heart attack (it was probably a panic attack, or maybe gas), I got used to the idea of death. I got used to the Devil and Hell, too, because I was pretty well-convinced they would take me at some point, for one thing or another. Even ghosts didn't scare me after a while. Death was a man with a scythe lurking around the corner and Hell was a place, and I kind of just stopped caring about the whole lot of it after a while. I think I was eight, maybe nine at the time.
Anxiety wasn't some terrible oppressive force that needed to be tamed, lest it take me away. It was like a passenger, that sat in the backseat and nagged at me all day. It needed to be given a nice snack and a book to read, and told to shut up. I was in control. I knew where we were going. It just needed to cool its jets and let me do this. Writing is a lot like anxiety for me, in that it's always with me. It sits in the backseat, making loud noises and demanding I pay attention to it. Like anxiety it always has me doing something. Always moving, always thinking, always scribbling something down. Otherwise I feel like my head might explode.
Yeah, sometimes it gets irritating.
So even if I'm happy, I feel like I could be doing better. Working harder. Making something out of nothing, and doing everything I can to make it worth reading, even when it probably isn't. It's never quite enough, even when it ought to be. I can never really rest, never really get a break from it, never really clear my head. I'm never totally happy with my writing, even when I'm happy in my own every day life. So that's why I don't worry about being happy. Even if it's crap, I'll have something to say. I just finished my first novel a few weeks ago, and I'm already plotting/outlining/sketching out scenes from its follow-up. Why? I like to tell everybody it's because I'm allergic to sleep. That's the funny response.
These days, I'm starting to think there might be some truth to it.
