ieva melgalve

..or not.
I am not having a writer’s block (just yesterday, after a day’s pause, five pages of comic script just semi-magically appeared and looked so fine, and I’m fine today too, thank you), and I’m not feeling afraid that the finished piece will be horrible, I am not afraid of being obscure, I am not afraid of being well-known, I am not afraid of rejection, all those things that the writers’ blogs are concerned with under “staying sane” tags do not concern me right now.
I am just wondering how do you stay sane without stopping to write.

How do you stay sane when you’re carrying a whole world inside your head, a world or two or three. (“Your head must feel very heavy if you’re carrying that stone in it”, the Zen monk said.) I want to know how do you stay sane if you’re reading something and connecting perfectly with what it is and just knowing what the protagonist is going through and what the writer is going through, and you’re going slowly insane with them. How do you stay sane when your eyes and ears are open; how do you stay sane with the overload of information of birds chirping babies crying cars droning keys beeping and yourself talking to yourself in a steady stream of words. How do you stay sane when you suddenly realize that you’re sitting on a bench, staring at three distant trees and on your shoulders, there’s your dead mother’s leather jacket. How do you stay sane when you’re writing a diary in third person and don’t remember what you’ve written a moment ago. How do you stay sane when–

–well, I guess you sort of could stay sane if you were writing just for money or for fame or something. But if you are writing because you love writing, that shifting of the tectonic plates of your mind, and slowly, the contintents of what you considered “yourself” drown in the blackness of ocean and new ones, the long lost Atlantis of your panic reappears, how do you? What do you hang on to, if the very purpose of your writing is letting go?

What amazes me the most is that people rarely talk about this; they’d rather post yet another article on the-perfect-structure or how-to-begin-your-novel or some other technicality that’s been repeated over and over, but they don’t speak of how they face that ultimate panic of rediscovering themselves. I don’t believe I’m alone in this. Is insanity a taboo, a “we’ll pretend it doesn’t happen and it will just go away” sort of thing? Is going insane (or, well, skating on a thin ice as I seem to be doing sometimes) considered a self-indulging thing, a “yea, she’s deliberately going insane because apparently she thinks it’s sooo cool” thing? Well, it’s not, not always. I very much doubt that all the crazy people are crazy just because they wanted to be. I know that I don’t want to go insane.

There is, of course, a simple way of not writing at all or at least writing about things that do not concern you in any way and don’t touch anything that scares you. That could help. But it’s a last resort, I think. After all, what’s the use of writing if you never touch anything important to you? Besides, I know that it is technically possible to write something genuinely deep and creepy and deranged while staying within acceptable limits of sanity. The question is how. Is it a skill like snowboarding where you have to catch the balance and get the speed up until you’re flying? Or is it something different, like cross-stitching, where you fill in the little spaces, never actually concerning yourself with the big picture? Does it require detachment, an ongoing reassurance that what you’re writing isn’t real? Or maybe it is about finding a “safe place” from where you’re writing, like religion or convinced atheism or strong philosophical grounds or unshakeable righteousness? Or is it as simple as healthy diet, no harmful substances introduced to your poor body, regular 8-hour sleep and working out?

And oh yes, I think there are answers to these questions, I just need to find them.
Actually, even knowing that I can have answers, is soothing.