controlled substances
Somewhat improbably, a prescription for .5 milligram Xanax pills costs about half of what the .25 milligram version will run you. I found this out in a doctor's office last week. I had already told him that I didn't have health insurance-- clerical error, my fault, the kind of thing that's hard to manage when you're weathering the daily panic attacks that necessitated the Xanax in the first place-- anyway, of course he prescribed the less expensive version for me. "Just go ahead and cut 'em in half," he said, and as I was leaving, again, "half."
I filled the prescription at the Walgreen's on Sunset in Echo Park; while I waited for it to be done I wandered the aisles, remembered that the last time I had been there it had been because I'd left a party early to try to avoid a panic attack. I had to come to buy melatonin, like that was going to fucking help.
Anyway, I realized, now I had a galley of my book in my bag, and I had promised to loan a copy to C., and I was across the street from her apartment with nothing to do for fifteen minutes. I texted her; she was home; she came over to meet me. It felt like a beat from a sort of on-the-nose mumblecore movie about young creatives. Here it was, the tangible sign of some success; here it was, evidence that I was going to lose my damn mind anyway.
More than that: I felt like an interloper in my own life, a stand-in sent in to mark a scene for someone else to play. Like the girl who had actually written that book, and found it an agent who found it an editor, had disappeared into whatever glamorous or at least pleasant life she had and deserved. I was just the fuckup wannabe, her ghost or her shadow, waiting to go home and slice a bunch of pills into pieces, to dose herself until she could get her brain to behave again.
We write a lot about how alienating success is to witness from the outside, via other people's social media presences. But in some ways it can be just as bizarre to watch your own self go through those same motions. This can't be it, you tell yourself. Shouldn't this feel better? You wonder. If this was really happening to me, wouldn't I be a better-- or at least a different-- person now? It's not like impostor syndrome, in which you don't believe you deserve what's happening to you; in this case, it's difficult to believe that it is really happening at all.
A few months ago I went to hear Eileen Myles read. During the Q&A someone asked her about her process. I don't remember the question exactly, but I do know her answer, because I wrote it down. "Well," she said. "You write the poem, and then you have the problem that is the rest of your life."
It's always difficult to keep those things separate, but never more so than when the complication of publishing arrives. Until now there's always been a difference between the work I do-- my career-- and the work I make-- what I usually do not call my art. Those distinctions collapsed when I sold my book and quit my job. Writing is the only thing I have to do every day; it is supposed to be the way I support myself. How is that not my life?
How is it possible not to be panicking all the time, when my writing is supposed to be my life? How can I keep the ebbs and eddies of the first book's small successes and failures from seeping in to the edits on the second book, the idea of writing a third, the idea that I'm going to ever be able to figure out how to make any of this come together into something coherent, something that makes sense?
The Xanax helps, and I don't mean that facetiously. It calms the wild, frantic way my mind wants to come at this and every question; it allows me time to sit here in bed, first thing in the morning, tapping away at this essay, thinking through it with my fingertips. It's true what they say, you know, that when you need the drugs all they do is allow you to function. They remind me to keep writing the poem; they remind me that the rest of my life is out of my control the same way it is out of everyone else's. What a relief.
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There are more than twice as many subscribers to this newsletter today as there were when I sent it out last week. The Ann Friedman bump is very real, y'all. If you want to catch up on past editions, there are only a handful of them and they can be found here.
Elsewhere, recently:
I wrote even more about writing, on Tumblr here and here.
I sold a second book! It's about boy band fandom and conspiracy theories.
And the first one is still available for pre-order.