When you’re riddled with anxiety, oftentimes, one habit you form is the curse of many forks. Splits in the road in twos and threes and more. What I mean to say is, that in the quiet of the night, you will travel down every path of doubt and dread, whether real or imagined. Things that could have been, should have been, and even things that could and should be. In the sleepless void you will crawl into the folds of your mind and find shadows. Shadows thick as fog. Fog that spills over every forked path you travel down to trip you up and lose your orientation. For a spell, you’ll travel down the path of the following work day, just your average day in the office. But in the swirls of misty shadow you get distracted by reminders of how much you despise the place. You want something new so badly but the chains holding you there are many. Your boss looms over every keystroke in his kingdom. Your peers are miserable and rude. Everyone who isn’t miserable and rude is at the very least arrogant and rude. And to top it all off, since anxiety is not anxiety if it isn’t making your life more difficult, you find it difficult to deal with from moment to moment. Eventually people begin to take notice.
But this is the many-forked path. So soon you find yourself further down the path of your day job, only to be greeted by a great many more splitting off into the wood. So many choices, will you travel down the path of “What if I’m late because I can’t sleep and get chewed out?” You can see the path of “What if I fuck up so bad I get fired” leads off into a clearing of self-doubt and into paths of unemployment and unpaid bills. Ahead lie the paths of “What if my co-workers think I’m weird and talk behind my back?” and “What if I’m stuck here forever and miserable?”
Each path into more paths, into more, and so on and so forth. It’s an exhausting hike. You’re completely lost. And like some grim second job you’re sent there every night. Thankfully my day job is not one of my current nightly anxieties (though that’s due to a recent career change). But one of my biggest anxieties is also the reason I have this page to type any of this: writing. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t try to write, when I wasn’t reading books and stories. But only in the last decade had I decided that it was what I wanted to do with my life. And that quickened a terror inside my belly that I’m carrying around still. Questions and doubts would come and go but one looms eternally, “What if I fail?” What if I spend years filling pages and documents only to have it all dashed against the slush pile by a faceless editor hundreds of miles away? But then, here I am, just under ten years after my decision to go for this, and after many periods of inactivity that made me question my commitments, and I’m still writing. Earlier today, I was going through some old notes when I found something I had scratched into this little pad a year ago, when I was living in a dank little apartment and wallowing.
If I don’t have this then what is the point?
Now before I get further down this path, I have to admit to another mental malady only recently discovered: ADHD. A controversial one to be sure, so much so that many of you just rolled your collective eyes. At one point in time I would have been rolling with you, but after months of study, trips to doctors and psychiatrists, I’ve learned about what a complicated condition it is. And why shouldn’t it be complicated? Or any mental condition for that matter? The human brain is one of the most complex organs we know of. It’s allowing me to tell you this and you to understand it. As I have come to understand it, ADHD is a disorder of the executive functions of the brain. This is not relegated only to hyperactive children. It means an issue with brain-work in regards to attention control, cognitive inhibition, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. For those playing at home we’re talking inattention, being easily distracted, impulsiveness, short-term memory loss, and hyper-focus. Those terms have been my biography since I was a child. But I was never hyperactive. Many of us that run on fumes were overlooked for warning signs as children, in an age where special attention was given to cases with hyperactive and over-imaginative kids running around.
But one thing I’ve never wanted to do is use my problems as a crutch. Everything boils down to the choices we make. I will say that my ADHD did not help with my dedication to this or that throughout my life. My writing, to get back on topic, suffered numerous blows. Months to years of something much more malevolent than “writer’s block”. Writer’s pit. Writer’s hole. Writer’s oblivion, if we want to be melodramatic (and doesn’t that feel good sometimes?) In periods where I did write, things would go unfinished. If you combed through my hard drive you’d find hundreds of unfinished projects and strings of ideas. Anxiety played its part, too. Even their buddy depression. But in ten years, while I have turned to and away from countless hobbies and ventures and pursuits and decisions I thought would help, one thing has remained a constant in my life. I want to write. For me, writing is the long road.
If anxiety is the many forked path, depression is the woods. And the sky above me filled with shifting stars, the ones I futilely try to use to navigate my way home, that’s ADHD. But writing is the long road. It’s that single constant stretch of endless drag that I walk alongside. The paths of my neuroses wind around the long road of writing and each fork I follow still manages to stay in line with it. It’s the source of comfort I look back to time and time again. And my ultimate goal is stepping onto that road and walking it.
But I think I’ve exhausted this (most likely unoriginal) metaphor.
The fact remains that at many points in my life I’ve been worried that I’m wasting my time because nobody will like what I write. I’ve been concerned that I’m just a man pretending to be a writer and that it’s just not in me and I should give up and move on. But I know that even if I couldn’t do this for a living I’d still be writing. If I was the last man on earth I’d still be writing. If tomorrow I was told I have months or days to live, I’d spend them getting down every last thought and story I could with what little time I had left. Because the constant comfort in my life has been this long road, this path of my soul’s desire that has a destination I may very well never even reach – and yet I would still walk it even past the mile marker where that realization hits me. It’s not as simple as something I want to do. It’s something I have to do.
After all, if I didn’t have this, then what’s the point?
Tales from the Outer Night 