(dis)comfort reading
sunflowers / anxieties / pills / fears / pinkies / biography
A storm. Tall trees. Pale green light on the lawn at 7am. A sparrow-hawk on a branch in the beech, shaking off droplets of white rain. Mists, the sun a silken disc, etcetera. The smell of burnt clutch. Pristine smell of gasoline. Strangers stopping by the house to collect ‘free apples’. The river, kingfishers above the reddish, bad water, where men paddle-board in life jackets, with cans of cider. Sainsbury’s: forty Benson & Hedges silver, for my stepdad. Sunflowers: several hundred, in a field by Star Well. Moths against the bedroom window at night, with alien eyes. Whole days lost to the screen. Work emails. Words, words, words. Most of them ‘not-good’. Social life: nonexistent.
Nevertheless, there’s been a slowness to the past few weeks, which has felt needed. Since I was last in London at the start of September, for a ten day house-sitting stint, there’s also been a noticeable drop-off in the thing, ‘that thing that happens to me’, ‘the horrible head-spacey’ thing, the ‘metallic taste in the mouth and loss of balance’ thing, the ‘I can’t talk or hold a conversation because if I speak I might vomit or pass out’ thing, and other poor descriptions I’ve come to use, privately and with loved ones, in an attempt to enumerate a series of mental and somatic symptoms that could succinctly, but unhelpfully, be termed ‘anxiety’. Incessant leg-shaking, a retreat into a version of myself inert as stone and yet combustible: can’t talk (inert), can’t be touched (I will disintegrate/explode).
Language is important. And the inability to effectively or accurately name or describe the thing … the inadequacy of language in the face of what feels in the moment like your consciousness and body are simultaneously, yet in completely irreconcilable ways, freaking the ever-loving fuck out is part of the problem. It feeds the thing, because it keeps it hidden. Likewise, the actual, relative invisibility of the symptoms – I can’t show someone the inside of my head, I can’t photograph whatever nuts alchemy of cortisol and adrenaline is pumping through my blood – makes it worse. With loved ones it’s particularly vexed: if I experience the thing in their company, it gets mixed up with a fear of disappointing them, a fear of being a pain in the ass – which is, of course, a fear of being judged. It’s a bit like weed-paranoia, when you become overly aware of the fact that your friend has a conscious brain and a set of eyes and is looking right at you. The temptation is therefore to not do anything, to not see anyone, to not go out: another kind of retreat, into the lockdown mentality, where physical safety became equated with claustrophobia, remoteness, disconnectedness, isolation – a headspace I’ve not entirely escaped from.
Diagnosis or treatment tends toward another brick wall. On the phone to a GP, after an hour on hold, a two minute conversation ended in a single answer: pills. Think of them as brain vitamins, were the actual verbatim words that the overworked doctor used in an attempt to persuade me onto SSRIs, when I expressed my part-legitimate, part-paranoiac concerns about medication (which as always – personal choice, and to my peril? – I passed over).
While I was in London, freakin’ out, I was also reading Tennessee Williams’ journals. And it seemed that every other entry would include some reference to the fact that he thought he was dying. Or about his nerves. His heart palpitations. Insomnia. Depression. Neuroses. Fear of oppressive dreams. Fear of fear. And anxiety. Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, anxiety.
I have attacks of panic – mostly on street – must rush into bars for drinks to steady myself – I get breathless – I have a weight on my chest – how much is sheer anxiety, how much real cardiac symptoms I don’t know –
The journals are, in part, a record of Tennessee’s mental health through the years. (I wanted to say decline, but I think that implies a kind of good-bad, light-dark dichotomy, easily collapsible into a failure-success binary, like: what are the KPIs of health? The goals, development strategies? Yuck!) His anxiety was exacerbated by his work ethic: his art was the centre of his life, without it there would be nothing. If he stopped working, he felt, he would die. But the relentlessness with which he pursued his work (i.e the relentlessness with which he was trying to not die) began to cannibalize him. ‘Exhaustion’ is a common word in the journals. I guess today we’d call it burn out, and he was almost permanently burnt out, from his early twenties onwards. But (Aries through-and-through) he’d keep working, usually juggling three or four or five projects simultaneously. Another common word: ‘pinkies’. Tennessee’s synonym for Seconal, which, Wayne Koestenbaum cleverly argues, creates a kind of pointillistic formal effect in the journals, each iteration of ‘pinkie’ a little tear, a little aberration or declension into a dosed dreamworld. Tennessee’s anxiety didn’t begin with substance abuse, but it was certainly intensified by the dizzying, daily cocktail of booze and barbiturates that characterize his middle and later years.
Discomforting reading? Sort of. But the journals also make for – horribly? – comforting reading. Because there was recognition: I recognized exactly, exactly, what he means when he scribbles, for instance – ‘Nerves – the fear of talking – society almost intolerable’ – even down to the breathy, staccato en-dashes. (‘Fear of talking’ is telling, for a writer: things can go on the page, but they can’t … be … spoken!) I can also feel the physical symptoms: the sensation of the throat closing-up, the tongue swelling. And when he notes (with an exclamation mark that reads like an upside-down smily emoji) –
After all, what older friend than anxiety do I have? Or should I say acquaintance? Yes, I should!
– I recognize that, too. The paradoxical, debilitating reassurance, the sense that the thing is not some malicious presence, but a kind of … I don’t know, a small glowing animal with sharp claws, always clasped to your shoulder, totally oblivious to the pain it’s causing you.
Reading the journals, anxiety-ridden, with literal heart palpitations, reading about Tennessee Williams’ anxiety, and literal heart palpitations, I was curious about the temptation I felt to over-identify with him, this writer I admire, the kind of… aphrodisiac of association… Is it deluded, sort of sad to identify with or find comfort in the trials and tribulations of a writer or artist you happen to like? Is it a form of empathy? Is it fake empathy? Is empathy even possible in this context (is empathy ever possible)? I also wondered (wonder) about the trend of memoir-cum-biography that transposes or sublimates relatively commonplace personal life experience through/into the lives of famous artists… and wondered (wonder) about the end of creative history – ha – and the sense that everything is repeating itself, rewriting itself, over and over again. It’s a myopic, unfinished train of thought – definitely borne from my current faltering attempts to write cultural/critical biography/history, and my ever-deferred (and so evergreen) impulse to instead just write poems, man – and it evaporates, here.
❦