The one about all-consuming writing, and emptiness
This is not meant to be a newsletter about writing, but this is all I’ve been doing for the past year so…
It feels like a bizarre emptiness inside to send a manuscript. Not bad emptiness, just weird. In the moments right after I sent it off, I felt so many things, and also a moment of recognition for all the things I had put into this — I ate everything in sight for months (I knew early on that I could not survive writing and depriving myself of food), I lost my mind, my ability to feel any emotion other than this, this pressing task in front of me, that I woke up gasping most nights, terrified all the time. That to write a book you must devote yourself like this, to stop caring about something as vital as your body, or your hair, or your skin, or the people around you, that all your energy is around this one alive object that sucks in everything and demands everything of you, that thrills you and also makes you the most depressed you have ever been, or the most depressed you have been in a long, long time, that this depression will scare you with its ferocity.
But it feels wrong that something has to be all consuming. There has to be a healthier, calmer way of working, in which you don’t sacrifice everything, yet this is the only way I end up, even after all these years. That it is a process so isolating that I felt disconnected from everything, including myself, is strange. That one day I looked at myself in the mirror and could not recognise whose body this was was alarming, and yet I continued to gorge and write. The brief moments of normalcy -- travel, friends, drinks, knitting -- felt shadowed by thoughts about the writing.
Isn't it nice not to talk about it anymore? To be so vacant that I have instead filled my brain with rewatching Grey's Anatomy?
Once done, it felt like taking a deep sigh after a long time. I felt almost relieved, almost right there. The writing adrenaline of a past life used to be like this, this endless systems of shocks, of highs and lows, all the time.
It sounds cliched but yes, in the moments after, the sky did feel clearer and everything did feel seem a little lighter, and the song playing on the phone felt more meaningful, and then I realised that I had floaters, and that the song was not speaking to me. Then, the euphoria gave away for desperate exhaustion, as if all the waking in the middle of the nights finally gathered to tell me - ha! You’re it!
I have now done all the cliched things one does after a major event. I scheduled a Dutch language exam. I started working out again. I lifted a weight for the first time in over a year. I got my hair cut. I bought things online. I slept. I feel alive, but I also feel that this is a temporary reprieve, that I am living on borrowed time, that I can fool myself into thinking that everything is over but it isn't. The-all consuming thing is lurking around the corner, waiting for me to relax before it takes my body and mind again.