Many years later it was still with me. I wrote on Twitter:
None of us are artists because we choose to be. There are things we feel that refuse to hide in the quiet corners of the heart.
A friend - early in his career, before multiple Grammy awards - reposted that and it got a decent amount of attention. This resonated with a bunch of people, not because - and this is purely my theory about the psychology behind it - it addressed a feeling of being anointed as a struggling artist, but instead, I think it was because it asked the question about choice. Essentially, everyone has a choice of whether or not they want to pay attention to their feelings and try to capture them in some kind of medium that we can manifest and see what they're feeling on canvas, a lyric, a dance movement, in a digital world. What you're reading is a manifestation of my need to express, so obviously, I made the choice. What's the other option? Suppression. Denial. Sometimes quiet suffering with just enough distraction will keep you busy from one day to the next, burying unwanted feelings deep, just waiting for an opportunity to resurface at a time when it’s literally the opposite of convenient.
The arts are as volatile as they are revolutionary, and the collateral damage of keeping all of those emotions barely checked is that they need someplace to go. Every emotion, just like every chord progression or story, needs a resolution. Anything that plays out in spite of that resolution, like a square wheel on a car, will break and ruin everything around it sooner or later. The highs of emotions, the chaotic chemistry of other creatives, the poison of social media algorithms, and the predatory nature of many non-creatives in the business, all contribute to just wanting the noise to stop so that something real can matter.
My first panic attack came after some heavy weeks of cricitism, confrontation, then an emotional sucker punch from a relative blind spot. It incubated, cooked inside me, and late at night when scrolling through social media feeds, one influencer was doing a skit about her thoughts on people from LA visiting, and said "...everyone in LA just wants to be famous." I tried scrolling past, then I went back and to the comments. I wrote, "no, everyone here is just trying to pay their bills." Erased. I wrote, "Fame? Fame is the last thing most of us need!" Erased. I didn't realize my heart was pounding. I wrote, more slowly this time, "Everyone...I know...is struggling." And with that, my chest started tightening up, twisting into a small tornado, and I felt like I couldn't breathe. Going for that ride, I flexed my hands to see if I could feel them, I was completely worried I was having a heart attack or some other kind of physical issue. It felt like ALL of the blood rushed out of me. I kept thinking "breathe, breathe, breathe" and slowly sat up, stared around my bedroom, and it occurred to me that I didn't want to die with my apartment such a mess. Give me a chance to clean up, at least. Once I sat there long enough, now in a cold sweat, and came back to myself with calmer breathing, I looked up and told my parents, "I know I miss you and everything, but I'm not ready yet." I went back to the social post, deleted the unfinished comment, then blocked the creator. I closed out of the app, then signed up for therapy. I filled out the questionnaire, decided to spend whatever it asked for, then tried to go to sleep.
The eight months that followed with my therapist, not only was I entertained and relieved by the recurring expression of confusion as she heard about my job, but I actually did a good deal of unpacking in the dusty corner of my brain’s attic. I had new perspective on my parents and their struggles at my age. I thought and wrote about past relationships. I thought about death. And life. And separation. And abandonment. I only knew for sure that I wasn’t imagining things. I might have misjudged the size of my problems, but I wasn’t wrong about them being there. I just wanted to get back to doing the things that always made me happy.
Isn’t this supposed to be about entertainment? Why are we talking about mental health? Is this an intervention? Easy now. I’ll come back around to it.
In my dramatic youth, absolutely everything was high stakes and impulsive, and my friends and I had our dramatic episodes that felt scripted for coming of age sitcoms. I swear, sometimes I could barely hear the narration faintly guiding the pauses: “Don’t worry about me! I know what I’m doing!” (“He did not, in fact, know what he was doing.”) When I passed through music classes in college to English, then to Theatre, I encountered a lot of people who were more engaged with their emotions, their actions, than the average person. People were slowly evolving to the habit of presenting an interesting, maybe even enviable, life on social media that had nothing to do with the reality of their day-to-day. Music had the greatest curve, the divide between people who used music as a language and people who learned it as a skill. Theater, on the other hand, invited all of us to exercise keeping emotions just barely under the surface, and for almost two decades, I learned how to use playwriting as a handhold while everyone else around me swarmed and fed like white blood cells racing in multiple directions through a blood stream. I met and navigated so many different personalities, many of whom I saw as cautionary tales, because they seemed to not worry about consequences, only fame, popularity, and opportunity. One in particular was as volatile as she was sweet, and used my apartment as her safe space. Things were always cozy and quiet until the world caught up to her, and her breakdowns on my couch, at my front door, in the middle of the night, were as exhausting as they were difficult to contain. At one point, her problems became too loud and complex for me to handle, so I shut down. It was too much.
About three to four years later, I found out she died. Her mother was trying to find someone who knew her daughter - really knew her - and after a brief conversation, she confided in me that the poor girl had ended her life after receiving a letter from her step mom, a cruel manipulation that was the last push she needed after an incredibly difficult public life in the years after I knew her. She was already gone two years when I got the news. I went through the hurt, the anger, the guilt, the frustration. I carried that unresolved sadness trying to understand it for months. I read books. I did a little ceremony for her at the beach. I even bought a ring that reminded me of her and her absence. Nothing placed it where it naturally felt like it needed to be. It took at least a hundred replays of one song, Sara Bareilles’s Gravity, to finally let a truth sink in. Her suffering was done. My suffering kept her trauma alive. I had to let it go and find a different way to look at it. Once I found that, I discovered a greater truth. We’re all one letter away from losing everything.
That even feels weird to write, so I can only imagine how it feels to read.
We’re all one letter away from losing everything.
I thought for years about what it would feel like to lose a parent. Both of my parents were in assisted living with Alzheimer’s, and I was able to see them once a year, so the changes were drastic. I got so many calls about the latest development that I stopped thinking about what I could break or throw or do when the news actually came. I thought my world was going to end completely, but both times, I heard the final confirmation from my sister and sat there stunned, paused in existence, as if I had just drank something that didn’t taste right, and I genuinely had to wait for a side effect to let me know if it was going to kill me. With both of them, I sat on my couch and stared into the distance until I realized that hours had passed, and I had to get something to eat. I put on my favorite podcast and took a walk, picked up fast food, ate it without even knowing I was eating, then slowly picked up functional pieces of my life. All of the terrible things that happened to me after both of them died could have ended me. They could have been that letter. The coworker who shook my hand and shared condolences for my dad’s death while offering to do the one thing that brought me joy was a sucker punch that could have done it. The losing of my job less than a year after losing my mom passed could have - especially during COVID - been a great opportunity to check out of this story and close the book.
I don’t know what to tell you about what kept me here, without even a hint of self-harm or abandonment. The number of difficulties, betrayals, and people dead set on a direct and disproportionate amount of hurt aimed at me have all been enough ammunition to inspire me to dive head first into the darkness, but I’ve developed a small, consistent light of hope inside that gets me up in the morning for another day of curiously finding out what lies ahead. I have gone through whole episodes of life completely alone and in anguish - my sacrifice for an undistracted life in art - and I feel like I still have something to contribute to the experience. Regardless of the weight I carry on any given day, the second I meet someone in a space where they need a sounding board or want to figure some things out, I get rebooted for the moment and find joy in the selfless existence in their world. If that person is creative, that is a language I love and crave, and instantly my life regains color and purpose, but also urgency for the very simple reason that I know their insecurities are sitting just under a transparent layer. All too often they’re living life on a tipping point, carefully balancing looking normal like an artistic badass with a restlessness of wanting everything to stop, or wondering when it’s just going to do that on its own.
I see them as I see you, and my instincts understand your value in a way that you might not see yet. I constantly balance the light and dark and talk to my parents out loud about it, waiting for the intermittent creative inspiration to pick me up and take me to a new place. The urgency of saying what you need to say, to reach people, to make every artist regardless of their resume feel heard and felt and understood, is undervalued for want of all of the noise that nobody really has a good grip on. Nobody has all of the answers, but the important thing to keep in mind is that everything matters, and the unknown obscures a far larger part of the map than the sum of your life experience dictates. You can make the edge of the known world as immediate as you choose, but don’t jump quite yet. The skill for curiosity, discovery, exercising that muscle to learn, abandon, and trust is all part of the same muscle group. Doing all of that through the arts means you get to share your milestones, your journey, the heroic tales of you vaulting over obstacles or going through them.
I wish my friend was still here, and that she could have found the happiness others wanted to deny her. I wish I had just a little more patience and maturity at the time to keep her safe place intact. It’s okay to be broken, which can be beautiful at times, because it makes you even more unique and a testament to the path you’ve chosen...and the things you've survived.
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
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