Recently I was revisited by the Ghost of Indigestion. Every day, I rediscover the symptoms of something on my laundry list of problems that I was eager to forget. This one is actually simple. Limit caffeine, spicy foods, and alcohol. Unless I want stomach pains, diarrhea, constipation and 24 hours of regret, it's something I try not to forget.
Coffee... The nectar of many writers. It was the culprit. I got that new coffeemaker and started drinking more than usual. Mistake. See, what happens when the symptoms come... Means it's already too late. If I slip, it means cold turkey. There aren't withdrawal symptoms because my 'too much coffee' is still 'n00b peasant of caffeine' level. I just miss the taste and the luxury of making it when I feel like it. You tend to want the things more when you can't have them.
I can't say I've ever been big on alcohol or spicy foods but a couple glasses of wine with food or a swig of MOM before the spicy stuff is armor enough. A trendy heroin addiction or alcoholism has never been an option. I like not shitting myself and not being hungover.
Except there's kind of a way to get those delirious highs with patience and application. It doesn't hit as hard and fast as substance abuse but once you hit it, it's tunnel vision that explodes through your senses for hours, runs you to exhaustion and even has a mild hangover quality at times. It's a running high that can taper off into lows that don't make a lot of sense.
It's not the same. I've been through substance abuse and I can tell you that. But that's why it's brilliant. Even substances aren't equal in that sense. People might claim that the lack of inhibition is the draw of drugs; the numbing of pain, the otherness that doesn't exist in reservation and order. Yet those things were also why my 'brilliant' ideas were crap or I never sat down to do them. They were, ironically, the stuff of being sober in the room full of drunks. My forced and synthetic highs were inescapable. I learned from them but I came very near to regretting and regret is not something I let camp out either.
A creative high can be torture, even inescapable. I have a brain that races from being overfull and stops to becomes a super sponge. You don't actually need my brain to experience this. I've said before but I would rather just have an average brain. I'm never afraid that I'd lose who I am. Just like I realized drugs stole from my potential, I think my erratic impulses are something I could shed without regret.
Big intro, but it's time to get succinct. What is a sober high? What isn't it?
Working backwards, it isn't 'being high on life.' People who say things like that think mental illness is a cute quirk or pretend to be drunk when they don't realize there's no alcohol or stimulants in their drink. It's not meth-level energy levels and giddiness. At least, it doesn't have to be. High energy can be a plus if it's not damaging your productivity or making you someone strangers want to punch in the face.
Some writers use writing prompts to court free thoughts. Some borrow people's children (with permission-- don't kidnap). It doesn't matter if your work is fiction or not. Achieving a state of euphoria is about introducing foreign ideas until you start looking down the ones that trigger the brilliance.
Lose structure.
No, really. Fuck grammar and punctuation and plot planning and sensibility. Write smut or wander (or blog). Eat something you might feel guilty about. Sometimes what beats the muse out you is as simple as the ennui and repetition of discipline. Shake things up. Start small. Use your favorite borrowed kid to take turns writing the lines of a story. Indulge in mental hilarity by rejecting convention. You can harness it all later.
Mad Libs.
This one tricks you into concentrating on grammar. Indulge in 'quickly pooping green fart salad'. You don't necessarily need an actual mad lib sheet to pull this off. Take a boring article, cross out words, identify the kind of word part, write them in order, make new words. It's a mix of imagination and unoriginality. Even better, borrowed kids can play too. Pro tip: use 'igloo' as a noun at some point. But wait until someone is taking a drink so they'll shoot it of their nose. Once you're good and giddy, attack your own work.
License Plate game.
If you were a kid that grew up going on long road trips, you know this one. When you go on a walk, take the three letters on a license plate (US standard at least) and make objects or phrases. GBG might be Get Bad Grades and YML might be Yellow Magnetic Llama. Yes, the dumber the better. Picture it and it's a mini acid trip. Try not to use the same word twice. Not only doesn't this make a boring walk interesting, but you might add a goofy bounce to your step.
Mirror writing.
Another youthful discovery. Learn to write upside down and backwards. Hold it up to a mirror. It's kind of a pseudo discipline but one that bends the way you think. Creating, finding its secrets, can often be about inverting and flipping what you know and see. In the past, when asked what keeps me locked onto my goals now, I hesitated to answer it because the surface is generic shit you've heard before. When I've looked deeper, I've found the distortions, the ripples in what is overlooked. Why do we look at oceans when it's virtually the same view? It shifts slightly different on its own, but turn it over so that the sky is an ocean and the ocean is the sky and suddenly all the poetry and analogies of either can be applied with a different stroke. Mirror writing is one of the simplest ways to do this. You can lift and turn and alter the page and there's a manual aspect to handwriting that triggers something too.
I could go on with simple ways to achieve that creative high. I wish I could say they were foolproof, but that's not the unique and frustrating part of it. It's not as easy as a drug, but it is something you can mold and have agency over. You can lose sleep over it, lose sanity over it, but it's not a poison and the addiction isn't a synthetic chemical dependence. Even I can forget how amazing it is and I've been there more times than I can count. When I sober from it, the magic can be forgotten.
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I'll never be an expert, mark my words, but I can tell you, it's never easy. There's always a price for the things both good and bad. Not karmic or anything of that sort, but you'll sometimes run into people who hate seeing you happy, or sadness will always keep you from doing anything worthwhile. I'm going to go with a little tough love here since creative outlets tend to attract a lot of sad sacks, but it's not really your sob story that people want to hear. I'm not saying to not be honest about your past, but don't give people the impression that that's all they have to look forward to in your future. It's not the absolute worst people want, but the glint of hope. It's not JK Rowling's cookie cutter depression or Stephen King's brush with death. Those things took more than they gave. They have something else, a skill, that they never gave up on and if there's a magic key to making our struggle triumphant, that is what we want.
Then again, I'm just not universely empathetic. I don't cry when celebrities die. I don't know them and I can't say for certain anything more brilliant might have ever come from them again. Who they are as people? Not my business unless we become friends. Even then, their life is my secret and theirs to tell. It's how I learned to survive. I protect people by filtering my emotions and not letting them decide for someone else. You might see it as cruel but wearing my heart on my sleeve was like accepting that I had every intention to keep being a victim. What we care about... Quite frankly, is none of anyone else's business.
All right, enough of the blog break. So much to do this month! Next October, I may go for the Inktober deal. This year, too much ran into this month to squeeze it in. We'll see.
