Neurotics Anonymous

At 11 o'clock this morning, it suddenly occurred to me that everything I've written in the past six months is indefensibly wretched. I was staring off into space, phone attached to my ear as I "participated" in a never-ending conference call (no, really---I'm certain that in some lower level of hell, it is still in progress), drawing doodle after doodle of the same face-with-giant-nose (fig. 1) I always draw, when a line from a recent poem rambled uninvited through my head. "My god," I thought, "that's awful." And just like that, I was off, chasing the, um, mechanical rabbit of perfection around the greyhound track of...self-doubt. Yeah, that. (See?)

Anyway, so there I was, my supervisor droning in my ear about a budget crisis or the rapture or something as I watched my future combust around me. Someone in New York asked for an update on a project for which I unwisely assumed responsibility some weeks ago, and I quickly rattled off something like, "Great target analysis end of the week progress," annoyed at having been pulled away from the productive work of tearing my writing ability to shreds. The comment sufficed to move the conversation along, and I was left to celebrate my despair for the rest of the meeting.

When I was finally unleashed from my obnoxiously short phone cord, I decided the best way to revive my disintegrating dreams of graduate school was to shut the hell up and start writing. I made a salad (recipe: open bag of romaine lettuce, add dressing) and hid inside the empty conference room to write. As I sat, pen poised over unhelpfully blank paper, I remembered the advice given to me by Natalie Goldberg, a former writing teacher (and author of Writing Down the Bones, which is kind of like yoga for the brain). She advised that, when faced with a moment of doubt (or, in this case, an epiphany regarding my advanced level of suck), I should write it out for 10 minutes---just launch into a diatribe of how unfortunate the world is that I ever learned to write and what have you. So, for the next 10 minutes that's precisely what I did.

Guess what? It worked (that Natalie Goldberg is one smart lady), and I found myself feverishly scrawling something like a poem across my notebook---a cheesy little poem arriving at the conclusion that art itself doesn't care much if what I write is perfect or popular or, most importantly, legible; all art ever asks of me is to spit out my anger or frustration or boredom or anything else and catch it neatly in the handkerchief of poetry. Pretty, right? But this actually made me feel better, and I even managed to create a back-up plan for how to spend 2007 should I not get accepted into the program of my dreams. In case you were wondering, it involves road trips, going back to being a barista, and, you know, writing more. And in case you were wondering less about that than about whatever happened with my salad, well...I ate it. It was lovely and green.

Since no one is likely to ever read this, I think it's probably a waste of bandwidth to go sharing advice, but just in case: if you're all jacked up with anxiety about the state of your writing, give yourself 10 minutes to write about how terrible you are. I guarantee you that after about 5 minutes, you'll get so annoyed with yourself that you'll blissfully and sanely return to your work in progress, be it writing a poem, a love letter, or a transcription of whale songs. Or, hopefully, all of the above.