030. (excerpt)
I remember a conversation I had with my friend Charlotte once, when we were in the same senior-year writing portfolio class. We agreed that we needed to feel sort of anxious and agitated-- or extraordinarily happy and excited, which could be considered positive agitation, I guess-- to be able to write much at all, let alone write interesting things. It's like the anxiety has a galvanic effect, or like it's a heavy pressure inside your body that's literally forcing you to extrude words, to externalize all the thoughts that are building up like a storm front. But if you become too anxious and agitated, if that delicate balance tips just the tiniest bit in the other direction, it's impossible to write. It isn't that your thoughts have stopped racing, but somehow the effect is paralytic instead. It's similar to selective mutism, which is a stress reaction where a person who can speak fluently at least some of the time becomes literally, physically unable to talk (or even to make noise at all) in certain types of situations. You are too intimidated to write or type or dictate a single word because you know it will be awful and stupid and your brain is going too fast for you to keep up with, anyway, and eventually the intimidation becomes an actual block and you start hyperventilating if you even think about putting something down on paper. The problem is maintaining the exact right amount of agitation for writing, and also the problem is being able to turn it back down again once you don't want or need to be writing anymore for a while, because the exact right amount of agitation for writing is still way more agitation than you want for mundane chores and social activities.
Of course, Charlotte once cried because she got a B+ on an English paper, and I've been known to take Fs on assignments rather than hand in work I didn't think was very good. (I almost never think my work is anything other than garbage, so obviously I've learned to ignore this sort of impulse most of the time. But occasionally my desire to really do a job as well as I think the job deserves still trumps my knowledge that it's better, practically speaking, to do the most serviceable job I can and finish the damn thing.) I kind of suspect that neither of us is motivationally normal.
Sometimes I get this crazy urge to pluck all of my eyebrow hairs out and see what I look like without eyebrows. People without eyebrows tend to have both a strangely naked, vulnerable look to their faces, and an alienish, inscrutable one. I mean when they just don't have eyebrows, period; it's a different paradigm if they draw on fake ones with makeup pencil.
My sister kept calling me at 1:00 AM last night, but I was going to bed really tired and assumed she was just being silly/stoned/unaware that I was sleepy, so I didn't answer. Of course, it turns out she was calling because she was locked out of the house. Now I feel pretty bad about it, and I'll probably answer my phone every time it rings from now on.
Of course, Charlotte once cried because she got a B+ on an English paper, and I've been known to take Fs on assignments rather than hand in work I didn't think was very good. (I almost never think my work is anything other than garbage, so obviously I've learned to ignore this sort of impulse most of the time. But occasionally my desire to really do a job as well as I think the job deserves still trumps my knowledge that it's better, practically speaking, to do the most serviceable job I can and finish the damn thing.) I kind of suspect that neither of us is motivationally normal.
Sometimes I get this crazy urge to pluck all of my eyebrow hairs out and see what I look like without eyebrows. People without eyebrows tend to have both a strangely naked, vulnerable look to their faces, and an alienish, inscrutable one. I mean when they just don't have eyebrows, period; it's a different paradigm if they draw on fake ones with makeup pencil.
My sister kept calling me at 1:00 AM last night, but I was going to bed really tired and assumed she was just being silly/stoned/unaware that I was sleepy, so I didn't answer. Of course, it turns out she was calling because she was locked out of the house. Now I feel pretty bad about it, and I'll probably answer my phone every time it rings from now on.