I make a few flippant remarks about writers being
bonkers. Not all are (obvs) but it does
take a certain kind of person to take joy from sitting in a room all day,
alone, conjuring stuff out of their heads from memory boxes or absolutely
nowhere. Our brains are our powerhouses
(give or take a heart). We sit there
typing away at a keyboard, tears rolling down our cheeks at the powerful words
we write sometimes, or cheering as one of our characters exact revenge – so
real are these fictional worlds to us (obviously I refer to the fiction writers
here and not those who write cooking manuals).
‘What if’ is our mantra. We spend
a lot of time wondering ‘what if this happened to her’ ‘what if that happened
to him.’ Anxiety sufferers in the
non-book world are crippled by ‘what ifs’.
They are beaten with unrelenting sticks of ‘what ifs’ from which they
long to escape whilst writers stand there with signposts on our chests directing
‘what if’ traffic towards them. It’s no
wonder that writers are prone to anxiety.
Anxiety isn’t depression. Depression is far worse: a black
cloud that eats up hope and energy, a terrible thing to have – the worst. Anxiety is exhausting but it creates the
energy it needs to feed from. You become hypersensitive to everything around you
and what threat is poses. I’ve had it on and off for years, it’s become part of
my way of life. It’s usually my friends
who tell me when my worries are exceeding ‘normal’ levels. Being a mum of two teenage lads and ailing
parents – plus chuck in the menopause - brings what I call those ‘normal’
worries. It is normal to worry that my cocky
man-child will not kill himself on a jet ski when he’s off to Ibiza with his
equally cocky men-children mates. Normal to worry that my octogenarian parent
still thinks she’s able to climb up on a ladder to dust the top of the curtain
rails. But when I lie in bed and worry that the ceiling might fall on my head
in the middle of the night, for absolutely no reason at all, I know that the red
button in my head has started flashing danger.
I know how to manage it. There’s no shame
in admitting I need some non-addictive chemical intervention occasionally;
something to help me sleep and keep me asleep. I’m sure that the new wave of mindfulness
might help, except I can’t sit still long enough to meditate. My mouth would be
saying ‘Om mani padme hum’ but my head would be thinking ‘Oh shit, I’ve just
thought of a plot hole in chapter 5’. Plus
I haven’t managed the Lotus position since 1975.
Those periods where I am at my most manic, where my brain is
spinning like a top, are my most creative times. I am in writer’s heaven. I’m at my worst and my best all at once. That is the curse of anxiety for me, it is
the conjoined twin of my imagination. Anxiety opens doors to chambers in my
head that only it has the key to. It nudges me awake at three in the morning
with the best ideas. Without it, I
wouldn’t be a writer. Or, at least, I’d be one that had enough writer’s blocks
to build a mansion with.
I’m not alone, I know.
Loads of creatives are fruitcakes with added sultanas, we are renowned
for it. Renowned for our excesses and
our greed and ambition, renowned for our insecurities, yet we are drawn to the
most insecure jobs on the planet.
Anxiety is part of my life and my world and so I cannot deny it entry
but, like a demanding relative who has stayed too long at Christmas, there
comes a time when I am too tired to entertain it. I need uninterrupted sleep. I need to walk down the road without thinking
that a car is going to plough into the back of me. So it is forcefully shown the door, until I
realise that I miss its company and the inspiration it brings and ask it to pop
back for a cuppa, but it always arrives with its suitcase, and so the cycle
begins again. We are old enemies and old
friends, anxiety and I. I am at my most clear-thinking in my work when I am at
my most chaotic away from the desk. Take it or leave it, that’s the
unnegotiable deal it puts on the table.
I take it.