This feeling that I’m feeling is hard to describe. When I was fourteen, my friends and I described it as angst. We talked about the image of it because we were Honors English nerd-types, deeply into imagery and symbolism, deeply into all things “deep”—roiling around in the complicated feelings of teenage protagonists in books like Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace whose feelings described by their now adult authors provided a narrative of teenage complexities yet to come. Since we were newly minted teenagers, these were valuable reference points. We would sit in the hallway across from our lockers with our backs against the wall. I would scribble the name of the boy I was in love with at the time in the notebook propped on my knee. I would say, I have the angst, and it was true, I did. I had always had the angst. Laying awake in my bed, when I was nine with my hands under my pillow behind my head, the angst would keep me up at night, spin me when I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t know which way was up. Holden Caulfield and Gene Forrester, were one of the first narrative characters I had come across that had the angst too. If not in any way else, I could relate to them in this. Angst, our fourteen-year-old selves conferred and decided, is when you take your fist and run your knuckles hard along a brick wall. ANGST (capital angst) is when you walk down a narrow hallway, brick walls on either side, and you spread your arms wide and run BOTH fists down each brick wall.
As I got older, I would name the feeling itchy stomach. A restlessness. A conflicted-ness. A feeling of limbs newly awakened after having fallen asleep. A feeling of believing something so exquisitely true but knowing, intellectually, it is false. It is the feeling of dichotomy, disharmony, discord. My whole life, I’ve carried this feeling against my belly like a fishbowl with two fishes swimming in opposite directions, trying hard to not slosh the water over the top of the bowl.
This feeling has ebbed and flowed, and sometimes, so rarely, mercifully, it has disappeared. How I deal with it is to give my mind something to do. I pour it into something… anything. In college, I would hole up with books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, quote collections, novels… just anything. I would inundate my brain; bathe it in other people’s words and feelings and stories. I would stuff myself with ideas that felt good or felt bad… whatever feeling I thought might help. I would consume, swallow whole, libraries and bookstores (RIP bookstores), my free time spent combing for treasures, curled up in chairs or at a table— chin propped on hand behind a wall of books.
These days, little has changed. I’m still susceptible to rabbit holes. Shlooop. I fall into them on the regular. There is a comfort in them. These rabbit holes can be about anything I’m interested in—podcasts, Netflix, true crime documentaries, novels, TV series, Reddit (the blackest of black holes) anything, anything, anything. Some rabbit holes are conducive to writing and being creative… some rabbit holes are not. I sometimes think of them as Good and Bad… but in truth even the good ones can be bad. Any rabbit hole can keep me from doing the work that I want to do.
As I get back into the flow of writing, I have to forego my any rabbit hole will do mentality. I have to practice habits of good creativity. It is a discipline. I have to be disciplined. In the time I have to write, I need to actually write. I have to choose the things that make the doing easier. Like the Elizabeth Gilbert quote, I have to give my Border Collie a good job or he will get up to no good.
wizard versus ... 