I think that many writers and musicians struggle with something called imposter syndrome.  It’s an actual thing coined by psychologists in the ‘70s: an inability to internalize accomplishments. Basically, it feels like you aren’t really that great and that you haven’t done anything of noteworthy praise even if you have. All the hard work you’ve done is just the hard work you’ve done–you feel you should have worked harder.

I haven’t won any medals for my art, nor published in any famous literary magazines. I haven’t made a complete record or been signed to a label. Many of us haven’t. But I have made tiny accomplishments, and like many, I continue to practice most every day on making my writing and/or music more palatable to me and other people. I continue to send work out, getting published or being asked to play sets here and there, chipping away, realizing full well that a lot of times I’m published or asked to play out because of who I know or being in the right place at the right time. It’s a small world.

Regardless, there’s this deep seated fear when I’m around other people who are also artists. What if they find out about me? What if they find out I’m not really real? That I’m a fraud or a fake and that I can’t really write and I suck at music and I’m just pretending I know what I’m doing? What if they listen to my songs and cringe? What if they read my non-fiction stories and go, “Poor thing, deluding herself that she can write.”

When all else fails, resort to LOLcats

Every time I start talking with a new musician or writer and we get to the point where we want to collaborate or exchange work, I run through my list of creations and start backpedaling in my head. Maybe next time, I think. When I’m better. I can send them something then.

Practice has taught me to share anyways, to keep creating and honing and articulating in spite of the very real sensation that I’m not really real and any moment the art police are going to come in and arrest me for taking up space inside their museum of only the best and most pertinent creations. It’s an uphill battle fought with a too-flimsy stick on terrain that is slightly moist and covered with slippery rocks. Below me, at the bottom of the hill I climb every day I hone my craft are the creations I’ve sacrificed along the way.

Like a collection of disabled dolls with their limbs sewn on wrong, my prior creations make up a landfill of misfits. Each time I’ve finished something, I  move on to the next thing, try to make the next thing better than the previous thing in an endless process of replacing an older creation with an upgraded version and discarding the previous experiment after seeing its glitches.

Above me is the holy beacon of recognition, thought to be obtained through self-awareness. It is tinged with the chance of social status, validation, an endlessly tantalizing carrot on the stick pulling me forward in spite of the years of hard work ahead (most of the people I know who are finally getting published to accolades are now in their forties).

Sucking at your art is relative. It depends on who you talk to, who you compare yourself to. If I say I suck because I only lifted 42 times on one arm with a 16kg bell and one of my readers says he can’t even lift one of those bells a portion of that number of times (which happened the other day, thanks Mike!) I pause for a second and go wow, my reality is entirely based on proximity and perception.

Of course, the whole thing unravels and I’m sloshing down a slippery slope straight into my pile of misfit creations just as soon as someone near me does better or ignores me or gives me some harsh and needed feedback. Then everything I’ve done up until that point simply doesn’t count.

It’s so easy to forget what I’ve done, to wish for more. To be impatient with myself. To feel like a camper in my own body. Sometimes I read my writing and wonder who wrote it. Sometimes I wonder if writing being a reward in itself is enough, if making music for music’s sake is going to continue to fulfill me the rest of my life, if it’s OK if I never “make it.“

It is and it isn’t. Like Pinocchio, I want to be real; like Christopher McCandless, I find that happiness is often only real when shared.

Put a dead bird on it. Yes, there is another sticker here that catches the eye…

It’s been a strange time–for a few weeks I had nothing but ideas. Now I am struggling to put together enough paragraphs to update this blog. I hate it when blogs start out with, “I’m sorry I haven’t been around…blablabla,” but here it is.

I started writing a post about imposter syndrome. I thought of writing a post about meeting other artists and the scarcity complex, but in general I am like the dregs at the bottom of a burnt cup of coffee. I don’t want to self-express in public. I want to lock myself up in a cabin somewhere and spend every day hiking until my legs give out.

The Pacific Northwest is the perfect place to disappear.

I’m in Portland for a few days, home of the creative person, doing a freelance assignment for a music trade magazine, taking pictures of street art and trying to find a cup of coffee that’s not burnt. I was in Seattle a couple of days ago and could not find a bad cup of coffee if I tried. Every single cup, black, was perfect. Smooth dark heaven. Here? Not so much. In fact, not at all. Expletives have been plentiful in my brain. I need good coffee. Like my friend Bucky said, “Dude, it’s all we have left. We have to obsess over it.” I don’t have cigarettes, pills, alcohol or bad behavior anymore. What I have is a need for good coffee.

***

Anyhow, lately I’m thinking about writing–what it is I’m going to work on next, the Beast Crawl coming up, the two music gigs I’m playing in June, the side project I’m trying to get off the ground–and I’m also just trying to be a human being. I’m thinking about other writers who are more successful than me and me trying to find my balance and my voice amidst the cacophony of noise about where, when, how and what to publish. I’m trying to listen to the silence in nature and find my path in the empty spaces, cultivating what I need to cultivate before I send it out, without the pressure of trying to fit in and be awesome and accepted and part of the group dynamic. Most things take time, especially art.

This place did not have good coffee. Neither did the place down the street. Neither did the food carts.

Speaking of not fitting in–I snuck in a kettlebell competition while I was in Washington. I expected to do as good as I did in Hawaii, and was aiming for master of sport. First off, I was in flight 20 of 20 flights, which means I didn’t compete until around 3pm when the competition started at 9:30am. I watched the people from my gym and the Orange Kettlebell Club do amazing sets, pushing through until the very end.

I don’t know what happened when I finally went up. I used a bell that was differently shaped than my normal bell. I didn’t feel strong. I struggled through the first few minutes, hitting my goal reps per minute and then I lost all my steam. I knew I should switch hands, but I decided to push out one more rep because it was a minute before I was supposed to switch.  I lost the bell. My legs had been weak, shaky, and I was tired. I’d had little sleep and hadn’t eaten enough that day or the day before, but had trained super hard for weeks. Three days previous, I had eked out 103 reps with that same bell. I needed 106 to get master of sport. I got 42 on one arm before it all went to shit.

Everyone else kicked ass. I mean kicked ass! Whatever. The worst part was that after I dropped the bell, some guy tried to give me advice on how to do a ten minute set. I just looked at him like, “Wtf.” It really irritated me. I do kettlebell because it’s a sport women can kick ass at too. Dude bros who lift don’t usually give me shit at competitions, they say, “Good lifting,” and pat me on the back. To be given advice (and none of the guys who dropped their bells were being given advice after their sets) as if I hadn’t been training and didn’t know how to breath right was obnoxious. But I bombed so hard and looked like a girl who couldn’t lift and my ego got bruised something fierce. Which is probably a good thing for me.

It’s very good to fail sometimes. I can’t tell you why yet, only that John, Juliet’s coach walked over to me and gave me a hug after my set and told me that everyone drops the bell at some point. Also, towards the end, when they were giving out medals, he came over and got me from the corner of the gym and brought me over to where everyone was sitting. And I got a medal, third place out of five people in my weight class, for doing the worst set I’ve ever done with the 16kg yellow bell.

I don’t understand what happened, probably never will. All I know is I felt invisible, again. I couldn’t prove myself with my muscles. Just like sometimes I can’t prove myself with my writing or music–I can’t tell you how many tryouts I’ve had with music or playing my songs in front of people where it just fell flat.

The worst part is knowing you can do better and watching yourself fail and having to accept it. There’s a place for failure. I just am not sure where exactly. The only thing I know is failure can only lead to success if you don’t let it get you down.

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Wake up terrified.
I don’t know
where I am going.

***

Driving away from your van
not looking back at you

***

Blindly creating
putting it out there
for everyone to see

***

A pit in my stomach
for all of the unknowns

***

Free falling hundreds of miles
When I’m here sitting still

***

Yours? Add your ten-word description of “lost” in the comments below.

The music I gravitated to as a teen and recently is dark, usually involves great drums, dark heavy bass, dissonant guitar chords and a male singer. Not quite metal, electronic or industrial, I look for the genres that combine these elements. Think a mix of The Cure and Killing Joke with Ministry and Skinny Puppy and some hardcore blues and gloom metal thrown in for good measure.

I have an idea in my head of the type of music I want to be making for another project I’ve been writing songs for—aside from the current more mainstream Indie type album I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. It’s something I’ve wanted to work on for years. I’m wanting to pair my voice—rich, laconic, pretty—with heavy, intense drumming rife with pauses and starts, dark groovy bass lines and jagged guitar. Some industrial edges mixed in that grate on your nerves in a tantalizing way. Lyrics that stick (I have no problem writing those.)

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Not quite like Trent Reznor’s project How to Destroy Angels, but along those lines in a sense: It’s good, haunting, melodic—but it’s kind of the danger of what can happen if you pair a pretty voice with electronic/industrial elements. I don’t want it to edge too much towards pop. I don’t want it to be too mellow. I want it to be raise the hairs on your arms. It will be melodic, dark, haunting. Nails on a chalkboard at times, yet other times so stark and poignant you have to stop in your tracks and pay attention. Music you cannot get out of your head, like the voodoo blues with a serrated edge. (This 12-year old can show you the blues…)

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Fact is, the internet gives me a much wider world to search for potential collaborators. These days, you can record tracks in a studio or at home and then send them via email links to personal servers or file sharing sites. The only problem in the end of online collaboration is touring, but hell, if you make something good enough I’m sure there’s a way to work that out.

***

This band has the bass and drums down, but there’s a danger with a female vocalist to make the songs too pretty and pop-like again for my tastes–which is where I think most mainstream bands who pair these elements tend to go. Sing-songy.

I want darker. Less melodic. Etch up the drums. The bass is perfect. More like Ozzy. What they’re doing is fine for what they’re doing, I’m trying to explain my own project ideas here using current music that’s complete.

***

In the past few years, when I’ve had goals, I seem to be able to make them happen when I write them down and focus on them without being wishy-washy. I’d like to meet the musicians who can help me realize this other project I’ve been dying to work on. And one of the main issues, too, is I’d like to not get sucked into a world of drugs, drinking and clubs in order to play live…I’d like to just be able to make kick ass dark, lyrical, haunting music without the drama that usually floats towards that kind of music like dust in the light of a window. Not many musicians I know are sober.

***

This is just one of the projects I want to do. The other I’m thinking is more along the lines of Nick Cave with a more bluesy edge–specifically the violins and upright bass.

So many options. Music is one of the most fascinating, fulfilling things in the world. The hardest part is finding other people who share your vision for individual project. Bands who stick together for decades, like U2, are not the norm, because musician dynamics are so varied and odd—we all have personalities.

I used to think when I was young, “How hard can it be to get a band together?” Now, as I get older and stay partially stuck in the wheels of the system, I realize that a lot of musicians settle for just having some fun before they die, making some music without subjecting their creative process to the music industry wheel (not at first, at least). Because if it’s not fun, if you start using words like “commercially viable,” it seems to lose a bit of its flavor.

I don’t care about mainstream for my own tunes. I see something local, and flickering through the intrawebs to the ears of those who want to listen. Big, small, whatever, as long as I can listen to the music I am dying to make in my own car on the way to work, it’s a start.

Finally, I got to spend a day in Juvenile Hall as an adult. I’ve been trying to get inside for a year now, ever since I started working at the county library and realized that there is a library inside of the Juvenile Hall too. The library inside Juvie was made possible by a grant some library assistants wrote away for while going to school for their Library Science Degrees. It’s a beautiful square room, stacked on four sides with books—from urban literature to manga.

I wasn’t sure what to expect—if I’d feel weird being inside Juvenile Hall voluntarily, as one of “them,” but I was blown away by the cheeriness of the staff inside the building and the librarian who trained me on the procedures so I can substitute for her in the future.

Basically, the kids are separated into groups, and different groups come in at different times of the day to get books, and the librarian tells them about new books they might like and plays a game with them, like Taboo or a memory game. She doesn’t talk about their crimes. She and the guards know they’re not in there for no reason. Instead, she offers a respite during their time, if they choose to seek books during their stay.

The (did I mentioned beautiful?) librarian happened to need help with judging the poetry contest. For about an hour, I sat reading through the poems penned by kids on the inside. Most of the poems reflected a conflict of being “bad,” but wanting to feel and/or change. Some wrote about dead children or mothers. Others wrote about having to toughen up to survive, looking in the mirror and wondering why they can’t cry. It struck me for the upteenth time how powerful poetry is as a medium. The fact that so many of them turned in poems…

I asked the librarian if a lot of the kids she sees in there are creative. “Yes,” she said. I knew it. Not that creativity leads to a life of crime—but I wonder how many of those kids weren’t understood in their homes, in their neighborhoods, with their friends. You do a survey, and not many of those kids are going to come from happy homes. Even the ones who do, it’s usually just status someone’s looking at—whether the parents had money and good jobs, not whether they were at home for their children, spent time with them. But that’s my guess.

***

I remember when I was in Fresno, age 15. I was visiting my boyfriend’s mom, who lived near the train tracks in a tiny apartment with her third husband and two other kids from other men. My boyfriend was from her first marriage. We slept in his little sibling’s beds with train sheets, their toys all over the floor.

The boyfriend and I drank and wandered around Fresno. It was Christmas time and we had a bottle of citron Vodka someone had given to us, saying “Merry Christmas.” They had gotten it as a gift and they thought maybe we, the dirty urchins sitting on the curb, could use it better than them. I got shitfaced, started badmouthing a mustached police officer outside of Café Intermezzo. It surprised me when he immediately arrested me. I was used to San Francisco where you could badmouth all you wanted and they essentially left you alone or merely kicked you off the main strip. Here, they didn’t take nothing from no one.

He handcuffed me, put me in his car and drove me to juvenile hall. I was screwed. Drunk enough to babble nonsense, but not blacked out, I cried and told them I was in love and they couldn’t take me away from my boyfriend. I gave them a fake name: Katherine Bodinger.

They fingerprinted me, made me shower, took my belongings and clothes, handed me a pink uniform and put me in a blue brick room with a metal bench. I sat there for hours waiting, reading graffiti on the walls, wondering how previous inmates had gotten their hands on a pen.

I’m screwed, I thought as doors slammed behind me while we walked deeper and deeper into the institutional labyrinth of corridors and barricades inside the hall.

I got put in a solo room overnight, then was sent in with all the other girls for school, a pink unit with concrete walls and high ceilings. I was livid. I remember there being books I could read—the only thing that saved me. I saw a female counselor after a day and a half (may have been longer, I can’t recall) and she said, “We’re going to release you to foster care late today.” I almost cried with joy. I’d told them my parents died in a car crash.

I didn’t have a record, so they’d put me in under the fake name I’d given them. The staff checked me out, laughing at me, asking if I remembered my drunken soliloquy the night before. Of course I remember, I said, glaring.

I waited in the blue room again, not knowing if it was day or night, and the foster care worker, a middle-aged guy with brown hair, came to check me out. As he led me to his car, I was incredulous, wondering if this was some sick joke, if they were trying to trick me into revealing my true identity in order to ship me back to the Bay Area four and a half hours away. It had happened before, in Santa Cruz and in Ohio.

The Foster Care worker talked to me while we drove. He asked me what area of Fresno I was familiar with. I told him that I was only familiar with the Watchtower District downtown. I get a lot of youth, he said, who don’t really want to go into foster care, are just going to run away again. Unless you want to start over, there’s no point in me placing you. Do you really want to go be placed in a home? I looked at him and nodded, not sure what he was getting at. I just wanted one moment of unsupervised freedom so I could access a phone or a door I could run out through.

I’m going to stop at this convenience store, he said. We are very near the Watchtower District downtown. He looked at me for a second before pointedly getting out of the car and turning his back to me. He unlocked all of the doors. As soon as he left, I opened my door. I got out of the car, running as fast as I could towards the bright lights and bigger buildings of downtown.

As I approached, I saw a familiar face, one I’d figured I’d never see in the previous incarcerated hours. My boyfriend: His shaggy shoulder-length hair, silly goatee, lean sinewy body tucked into patched up leather. I almost knocked him over as he was talking to a friend. When he realized who I was, he put his arms around me and in a split second we started running towards apartment buildings where his friend lived.

***

Being in the juvy today reminded me briefly of that Fresno juvenile hall. It also reminded me of a pink walled juvenile hall they detained me at in Ohio for a number of weeks previous to Fresno.

I felt different though. Confident, because I am so far away from who I was 16 years ago…I can understand that girl, who I was, but I would never, don’t ever need to go back there.

Which is why I’ve always wanted to work with incarcerated or at-risk youth in some way, just a little bit, whether it’s through a poetry class or substituting in the library where I actually get paid for my efforts, or just writing music, books and poetry they can read or listen to and not feel so alone. Maybe if I do, they’ll know if they hold on, if they try, a better way will emerge. And they will look back and want to help the previous version of themselves, but they will never want to relive that misguided life—the one where they felt they had no friends, family or world that could care enough or understand who and what they were. Maybe they’ll realize that they’re not so different, nor so alone, after all.

Seems a lot of people are in the air with the question, “Am I a musician?” I thought I’d make it a bit easier by giving you a trail guide pointing you in the direction of whether or not you are. If none of these apply to you, well, it doesn’t really mean you’re not a musician. But if some or all of these apply to you, there’s a good chance you’ve got the curse.

1. You’ve been misunderstood

Have you tried sharing your music with your relatives or peers only to be ignored, laughed at or told your songs are “different”? Keep practicing. Most people won’t get it. If you don’t suck, you’ll eventually find a few trusted followers (hell, even if you suck you can find followers. Plenty of examples of this on YouTube!)

2. You’ve been kicked out of the house while playing your music

My cousin, a guitarist and singer-songwriter (and 16), told me, “I knew I was a musician when my grandma kicked me out of the house and into the garage for playing too loud.” He immediately called his dad, a bass player, to brag about it.

3. You are obsessive

What they don’t tell you when you decide to pursue music is that having OCD is a good thing. You will need to be able to listen to and/or play the same snippet of a song fifty gazillion times in order to get it right. You won’t do this merely once or twice. You’ll do it almost every time you play music. And when you finally show a song you’ve supposedly finished to a friend, they’ll think it came seamlessly from your subconscious. You won’t want to tell them that you think with this song you’ve finally crossed the line into insane, that it was stuck in your head on instant repeat for weeks or months, waking you up in the middle of the night. That when they were talking to you about going to get ice cream you were wondering if you should cut the chorus a bit shorter and maybe add a more sophisticated bridge, or some harmonies. That when you were sitting on the toilet this morning you stared at the wall picturing the chord progression of your song and the lyrics all laid out in some sort of diagram and assessed each word for content to cut out redundancies and make it more consistent. No one wants to hear this part about being a musician.

4. You’re not conventionally good-looking

There are gads of musicians who are not known for their beauty. In the car yesterday, I was telling a friend, McKay, that I have to keep telling myself that I can still do music when I’m ugly, that wrinkles don’t preclude me from being a successful songwriter. He sneered and said, “Yea, because Leonard Cohen’s problem was that he was too old and ugly to make good music.”

Most musicians, (ala Simon and Garfunkel, for example) were not pretty to behold. Instead of being popular and cool, they sat in their bedrooms for years honing their craft and voila, in some kind of inverse universe reaction they became popular. Lennon, Ronstadt, Babs, McCartney, Nick Cave, Leadbelly…are (or were) any of these people pretty? No. Doesn’t matter. Next time you look in the mirror and decide you’re not beautiful and thus can’t make music, think again. You’re already halfway there.

5. You are never present unless you’re writing (or playing) songs

Most things in life, if you’ve got the curse bad enough, are like what my friend Joe calls the rice in a burrito: Filler. While you’re at your day job or chilling with family at a gathering trying to make small talk and deflect deeper questions about your personal life, you’re thinking about music. You’re thinking about getting into the studio again, or that keyboard part you added to a song recently and if you’re going to be able to replicate that sound, not the spreadsheets staring at you from a glaring computer screen. You boss might as well have a TV screen on their forehead showing you at your first big gig, rocking the hell out of the floor. Or biffing it and sobbing hysterically, but it’s music in your fantasies. Always music.

6. You listen to your own music in the car

Every musician I know sheepishly ejects a CD from their car stereo as soon as I get in their car. I have to reassure them that I know they are listening to their own songs in progress, and it’s OK, I do the same thing. It makes us dedicated, not egotistical. Where better to work on your songs than when you’re stuck sitting in traffic, able to listen to every nuance and assess whether or not it fits? Besides, we all know our own music is the music we’ve been dying to hear out in the world but can never find. That’s why we create it.   And also, if it’s playing on our own CD players, we can pretend it’s playing on radios and in CD players around the world, which we know it will be someday, or we wouldn’t even bother.

I’m doing something new tomorrow night–new for me. I’ll be playing guitar and singing in front of a group of high school students in a professional studio, as part of a project to show them what it’s like to record music.

I forget that not everyone has had the opportunity to be in and out of studios their entire life. I just hope that they learn something from the experience. Usually, in a recording studio, you have quiet and space in the room you are recording in. For the first half of the hour I’ll be recording, 15 or so high school students will be standing in the room with me.

The other musicians involved in the project, each doing the same thing, are Bay Area local. One happens to be my father, because my mother is the one behind the whole project. In art, nepotism reigns supreme.

Here’s the website to the dealimajig: http://www.polaramusic.info/studiosessions.htm

Since this blog is about music and writing, and specifically my music and writing as an illustration on how to live an artistic life, I think it’s important I mention the things I’m involved in, so you know I’m not blowing smoke up your ass about getting my own ass out there in the world to share my music and writing.

(ha! That’s funny. I don’t know what I’m doing, either, so if you come here for guidelines, I’m sorry! Alls I can do is share my foibles and fumbles and crazies with you and hope you relate, because I believe relating is paramount to understanding our own inner workings. I also believe we are all here to learn, for whatever reason, and learning is good. We learn best through finding out more about ourselves. Art is a great catalyst for self-awareness and sharing things with other people. )

As I’ve said before, my dad is a concert pianist, classically trained from the age of 4, and most of my (and my sister’s) formative years were spent hanging out backstage (or helping out on stage) while he did concerts in the Bay Area. I got to ditch school often, and was taught to value art over general education. My parents, whether they knew it or not, were creating an art-savvy monster, hell-bent on pursuing music and writing above all else. (And bound for poverty, too, as my value system places working for myself and self-expression over working under someone else’s thumb).

When my dad was my age, or a little older, he was working on a pop album with a number of classically trained singers. I loved his songs, and would listen to them over and over again. I also idolized the singers. I remember one of them, Tammi I think, sitting on the couch with me and playing with my hair while I imagined for a brief moment that she was my mom. I wonder sometimes if being around them was what made me want to become a singer, too, but I really think it was more that I admired a lot of contemporary singers growing up, from Dolly Parton to Bono.

Here I am again, doing a creative project with the fam. I dip in and out of these things because I am working very hard on establishing myself as an artist independent from my parent’s numerous community based projects, but this (free studio time, demoing my music as a teaching method for high school students seeking careers in the music industry) was something I couldn’t resist, as it’s right along with my interests.

I make an effort to never take a job or gig that doesn’t contribute to the skills I need to run my own music and freelance writing businesses. (Yes, I have a freelance writing business, and a music business. Says so on my taxes). If I’m not able to apply knowledge to my own business (the business of working on my own writing and music) it’s useless.

Being 30 is odd, because you still haven’t gained enough skills in the marketplace to be a menace to society, but you’re old enough to be called an adult. They say the new young adult “phase” is from 20 – 34. I believe it. I still feel like a little kid in a lot of ways, learning to be a human being.

Well, wish me luck! I am hopeful that many more projects that combine my passion for music, writing and teaching while using my own creations in the process are in the future. I’ve never actually done studio recording of my own songs with my parents there (although they heard me crank out song after song in my bedroom all through my teens). My music is very different from theirs. Should be interesting!

We sometimes like to talk about this nebulous thing called writer’s block. I’m struggling with non-fiction writing malaise and music writing malaise right now, which I guess you could call a block. Mostly it’s because I’ve been abnormally tired and lackadaisical these past few weeks, focusing more on trying to fix some of my health issues rather than creating the next best work of art.

I don’t think it’s bad to take a break. I’ve said it before. I talked about Mark Twain a while back. He said that he got stuck during two of his books. He went and did other stuff, and when he came back, the books wrote themselves.

Of course, there’s a line between taking a much needed pause from frenetic scribbling and complete inertia.

I can usually tell I need a break from writing and music when I try to work on a song or story and I can’t stand the sight or sound of it. Usually, I take that as a sign that I’ve reached saturation point and need to do some other stuff, like cook or shop or walk the dog or read books or focus a bit more on other non-creative stuff.

***

I spent these past few months working really hard on my writing and music–eating, sleeping, breathing my songs and stories, and then I went to Hawaii and when I came back I had to focus on some other things that had cropped up. Got sick, realized that the food allergies I’m having aren’t mild and need to be assessed better, that I’m under too much stress in my life, again–stuff that takes time to get to the bottom of. Those things, and finding a way to earn a bit more money, have taken priority in my mind, are sucking up the energy I had to focus on my art. But in addition to those things, I’m just not feeling it the past few weeks.

***

I was wondering the other day if the reason we force our art out on schedule, day after day sometimes is only because this is the way our society functions. Crank stuff out nine to five–at least part-time–or fall by the wayside.

Many of the artists, musicians and writers we admire were rewarded for their crazy work ethic. The ability to plug their creation cycles into that ebb and flow of modern society, the circular mode of produce, produce, produce with no space.

It would be interesting to look back and see how creative people we admire performed before the industrial revolution.

The writers I admire don’t make a lot of money at their art (not by choice, necessarily). They create more sometimes than they do at other times. They often take a pause, go on long walks, write letters to their loved ones…ways of coming back to themselves by not forcing the process.

It’s important not to force the process.

Sure, I could force myself right now to open up a document or pick up the guitar and start editing a song or story I’m stuck on, but my edits wouldn’t be intuitive right now. I know that if I fill up my tank by taking a pause I’ll be able to come back to my music and writing with many more ideas, and I’ll have an outpouring of inspiration. It’s happened to me most of my life this way. Can’t force it. Not me.

Which comes down to the ultimate question: why do you create art?

Do you create for reward from society? Or do you create because it’s who you are and how you process the world? It’s OK for the two to overlap. I certainly want to be recognized for my writing and music in this lifetime, on however small a scale. But if I’m motivated by money and the need to feel I’m being productive, that I have a good work ethic, I’m usually not in line with my own personal goals. I don’t do this for money. Some do. They’re called bestsellers. There are only a few of those out there. I’m not one of them, so of course, take what I say with a grain of salt (as I know you will).

What’s your creative process?

I’ve been living with a sense of impending doom for as long as I can remember. When did it start? Was it when I went for a check-up at age 13 and my skinny female doctor poked me in the stomach and said, “Getting a little chubby, aren’t we? Have you tried dieting?” Is this what led to coming home after middle school and scowling into a bowl of carefully counted goldfish crackers until I lost ten pounds in less than a month?

Was it growing up wearing Kmart clothes when my neighbors casually splurged on trips to the mall multiple times a year? Was it my parent’s own anxiety and depression issues they tried treating with medication, therapy, being workaholics?

I don’t think it was simply an external event, more a combo of environment, learned behavior and genetics, but I do recall that there was often a sense of dread in the air—always money or thinness. How to get it, where is it, why don’t I have it.

But deeper than that, anxiety recently has been a background hum as a result of choosing not to ever take medication again. Something called “rebound anxiety” lingers as a result of benzos, the medication I took FOR my preexisting anxiety for years. Those pills do a number on the nervous system. In Europe, they prescribe them for one week, max. The guidelines in the medical journals recommend not prescribing them longer than two weeks or so. Yet my doctors prescribed them for me for about eight years on and off.

For many people, benzo withdrawal lingers for years and years. I had what they call an extremely long protracted withdrawal–I couldn’t even feel joy for nine months after getting off those little yellow pills I relied on so much, only pain. I learned all about the little-known word gratitude as I struggled through, insomnia, nerve pain and a thrumming sensation in my body, heightened awareness of almost everything, memory loss, the ubiquitous brain fog. Like being shot with adrenalin day after day after day, but feeling exhausted at the same time.

***

“It is more difficult to withdraw people from benzodiazepines than it is from heroin. It just seems that the dependency is so ingrained and the withdrawal symptoms you get are so intolerable that people have a great deal of problem coming off. The other aspect is that with heroin, usually the withdrawal is over within a week or so. With benzodiazepines, a proportion of patients go on to long term withdrawal and they have very unpleasant symptoms for month after month, and I get letters from people saying you can go on for two years or more. Some of the tranquilliser groups can document people who still have symptoms ten years after stopping.” – Professor Malcolm H Lader, Royal Maudesley Hospital, BBC Radio 4, Face The Facts, March 16, 1999.

***

In spite of this, I stayed off the pills, got freelance work, started writing and doing music again. I wasn’t able to sleep much for almost a year. I had to do something with that time. I remember one day, waking up at 6 or 7am after four or five hours of sleep, thinking, “WTF do I do with the next eighteen hours until I can sleep again?”

These days, it’s the opposite. It’s more like, “How the hell do I work at the library, work on my music, writing, kettlebell/fitness, learning to cook with gluten issues, relationship with my husband, taking care of my allergic paw-eating dog, socializing with all of my new and long-lost friends and find time to read a book with only sixteen hours of the non-sleeping day?”

My how things change. How we adjust.

***

Anxiety isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. When I used to take anti-D’s, I didn’t care about art so much. I was numb—couldn’t cry, didn’t get too down. It was nice, for a while. Until years went by and I hadn’t progressed in the way I wanted to. As my old rehab counselor said last night when we went out to dinner to catch up, “Art and music are a coping mechanism.”

I said that they are basically the foundation of my sobriety. I know if I seek out pills, I will not do my art. As soon as I numb out the anxiety and lingering malaise, I have no desire to make music. I still write, but not as viscerally. And it turns into more journaling than productive non-fiction essay and poetry writing.

To compound matters, my food allergies (wheat, and/or gluten) trigger similar symptoms, such as fatigue, anxiety and nerve pain.

I am constantly grateful that in spite of being damaged by years of taking prescribed benzos and other health issues, I’m functional. I go work every day. I write. I read my writing in public. I work with other musicians on my songs. I do kettlebell.

The only time I have a problem with anxiety being a fact of life for me, mentally and physically, is when I decide I deserve better and that I want something other than what is.

I can’t have something other than what is. I try very hard to control things—to the point that my friends are like, “Dude, chill. Stop obsessing.” Then I back off, and everything kind of falls away. Then I go back to obsessing.

And sometimes, late at night, when I’ve got nerve pain so bad I have to sleep in a sweater to keep the air and sheets from feeling like they’re bruising my skin, I wish there was a pill to fix me. But there is no pill that will fix me long-term. They all have rebound effects after a time. I don’t want to take that risk. And the pills is likely what caused most of this damage in the first place.

***

I don’t know many people who struggle with anxiety at this level, aside from my husband, who channels it into work, and my dad. It’s something I’ve learned to live with. It’s better than it used to be after first stopping the benzos, but it’s still there and I don’t know if it will ever go away. Sometimes, after getting off of pills or drugs, people’s nervous systems don’t heal for five years or more. Sometimes, they don’t heal at all.

I could be mad that the substance abuse specialists and psychiatrists who were supposed to be helping me after I stopped drinking alcohol at age 21 prescribed me things that made me worse, but it was my choice to put the pills in my body, to trust that a pill could fix me.

It used to be that I would preach the ills of benzos and opiate replacement therapy like suboxone (which I was on for about a year and a half and had a horrible time with as well) to anyone who would listen. These days, I realize they are all tools, and as much as I think those two particular medications are poison and am scared shitless of them based on what happened to me, I don’t care if you take them. All I have is my own reality. All you have is yours. This isn’t about your pills or my pills or anyone’s pills. Take your pills, if they help you.

Mine helped for a while and then they didn’t, so I got off them. But not without taking extreme actions. My psychiatrist wanted me on them, even though they were hurting me. The suboxone made me sleep 16 hours a night, so he put me on Ritalin. The benzos stopped working so he upped the dose. I tried to taper them myself, but finally, I just went to a rehab and asked them to help me. And suffered protracted withdrawal. And now the lingering anxiety worse than the anxiety I started with, compounded by food and environmental allergies (yay).

I get sucked into these spirals of everyone else is better than me and more successful and has more money and doesn’t struggle with anxiety and body dysmorphia and money issues, and I don’t think it’s true. I think a lot of people are struggling with these things or something similar. And it’s made me who I am today, I can’t change that. I’m more sober than I’ve ever been.

Boy, do I wish I had the money to afford a fancy nutritionist and supplements and a spa therapy every weekend, but doesn’t everyone?

Like most people, I trudge along, have good days and bad.

Like fewer and fewer people these days, I don’t use pills to make modern life more bearable, but I know why people do. I’ve been there. I wanted that to be my answer. It wasn’t. Life to me is, believe it or not, more manageable without them.

“…Writers do not thrive on drugs like Klonopin and Prozac. It takes your soul; it takes your creativity; it takes your love of running home at night and getting out a typewriter or getting out your paper and pencil and writing something that you love. It takes that away. You don’t care anymore. So Street Angel was all about just not caring. And that’s horrible to me. One of the few things that I’ve never not done in my life is not care. And I didn’t care for a long time. The lows for me were probably the last years of cocaine in the 1980s, and the last four years of the Klonopin. - Stevie Nicks

I forgot to mention that 6 of my poems are up in the Spring issue of Analog Press: http://analogpress.net/

Apparently I am now also a contributing editor to Analog Press. I’m not sure quite what that entails yet, but will know soon! It’s a volunteer position.

***

I was sharing a picture with one of my coworkers yesterday. Previous to the picture sharing, she had been talking about how she was grumpy. She was doing art the night previous and had to stop creating before she wanted to stop, because it was time to go to bed and then go to work. “It’s like when you have a special someone in your bed and they don’t do you the favor…”

I told her I was totally going to steal that analogy for my blog, how interrupting your creative flow is like not being pleasured in bed.

She asked me if I was going to share the picture I showed her (unrelated to this side conversation) on my blog. I figured I might as well, because I was talking a lot about homelessness this week.

After I went to the training on homelessness on Tuesday, I felt more in tune with the scope of the homeless issue again. That night, I went to Safeway, in El Cerrito, and ran into a very thin old man with few teeth (he kind of looked like a very old Snoop Dogg) panhandling on the garbage can outside. I know from my own experience that the worst thing is to be ignored. I said, “I don’t have anything extra to give.” He said, “Neither do I.”

He told me that the door I was about to enter to go into the store was closed. I thanked him, grateful he had told me before I tried to walk through it.

“Have a good night,” he said. “You too,” I said.

The following day I was in San Francisco. I saw a gentleman who had set up a sign for panhandling, rife with spelling mistakes, but the setup was artistic enough to give me pause and want to capture it somehow. I asked him if he would mind me taking his picture. “If you give me a dollar…” he bargained. I said sure, then, without thinking, went and sat down by him, put my arm around his shoulder and posed for the picture my husband took as if I were posing with a friend.

The smile on his face…I was probably much more happy than him, but that made my day. I am not sure why. I guess he reminded me of me in some strange way. A creative person, but down on his luck by choice or circumstance, who knows.

I’m not sure why I look like a giant person in this picture, but that’s OK. I’ve accepted the fact that I am not very photogenic in 80% of the pictures other people take of me. Life goes on. I asked the guy his name and he told me it was Papa Smurf. I told him it was a pleasure to meet him, and when my husband and I were done eating lunch around the corner I gave him my leftover food, but only after asking if he wanted it. “I never turn down food,” he said.

***

I was walking through San Francisco a month or so ago with a friend, and we passed a bearded, dirty old man standing in a doorway with a shopping cart loaded with tarps and cans and other paraphernalia. The only thing you could see shine through the dirt of his face were his white and blue eyeballs. I made eye contact with him and he looked scared for a second, furtive. I smiled. In return, he gave me the warmest, most genuine smile I’ve ever seen. It was like he knew I didn’t have any change, that I wasn’t a stranger to his reality.

Or something.

***

We’re all human beings. It’s easy to forget, especially when I’m walking down the Haight and I get accosted on every single block for spare change (is there such a thing?), and I realize that those dirty, foul-mouthed kids sitting on the curb, the ones I don’t want to make eye contact with or give change to because I know they’re going to buy alcohol, are me over 15 years ago. And they can’t see that I was them. When I was sitting on those curbs, the people who walked by weren’t people. Often, they were cash machines. The ones who stood out were the ones who took the time to ask me about myself–sometimes it was the street photographers who took my picture and came back to give me a copy. I would keep that photograph in my worn Alice pack and pull it out every night to look at it, thinking, “There’s me. I’m real. I exist. Someone else has seen me.” I didn’t feel invisible.