One day I go to my computer and there is nothing left to write. Nothing of wisdom or beauty that is. Everything has been already done, all the important voices have already been recorded and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s painful truism is unveiled clear as day: all my best thoughts have been stolen by the ancients. And yet, just yesterday, there was a torrent of words that poured onto the page.
How to understand these variations in our being? I learned from Sheila, a patient at a government-run hospital where I worked. Sheila oscillated between a frenzy of artistic and social activity —some of it wonderfully productive and some terribly painful, even to her— and periods of stability where she would be a paragon of the compliant patient. How she would be depended on a number of variables in her personal life including whether or not she was taking psychiatric medication. The changes were often unpredictable. Weeks after being elected “patient of the week” and receiving kudos from staff and peers for her mood stability, Sheila would stop taking her prescribed psychiatric medication and become unhinged. Then she was like a lioness guarding her young, proud, fiercely beautiful and quick to violence if she perceived a threat.
The stable and the wild parts of Sheila did not talk much to each other, in fact they were barely aware of each other’s existence. Like the winter and summer, they occupied different seasons. During group-therapy sessions she would inform everyone with an air of almost religious righteousness that taking medication was the way to stay balanced. Then a few weeks later, in my office, she would toss her head with the nonchalance of an alcoholic at a champagne brunch and declare that she had been—cheeking—pretending to take medication and spitting it out afterwards. A few more weeks would pass and she was back in her avatar as untamed feline, a majestic but fearsome portrait.
One day in my office she made a poignant case for the choice that she made periodically to sacrifice her stability for something else .You see doctor, when I’m myself, without the medication, you may say I’m mad but I paint, I write, I take walks and have interesting conversations with people. Yes I’m very reactive. If something drives me crazy I act crazy. Yes I get in trouble and forget the rules and walk naked in the hallway when I’m upset but I feel alive. Even on days I’m miserable at least I feel something. When I’m on those medications you guys give me I don’t feel anything at all. I go about my business without a trace of emotion and my boyfriend can leave me and I’m totally calm—I just go to work like nothing happened. I know you guys think I’ve been really healthy for the last three months because I haven’t got in trouble and I’m taking my meds but what’s the use of looking healthy if you’re dead inside?
Stability in other words is wonderful if its organic but should not come at all costs. When we are functioning smoothly, like Sheila on meds, like a well oiled machine, we may also risk getting to an internal space where we feel dead inside at times. There is a poignant particularity to the internal space that she describes. It is filled with hopelessness and stagnation—like sitting in front of the computer negating words before you write them—but underneath is also a muffled, barely audible cry for an absent juice a cry that is begging for a listen.
The juice is the water of our inner world, anything but boring, calling to us like a song that must be sung or a cake that must be baked. The juice is the inspiration that invites us to create, converse, relate. On days when we feel split off from ourselves, we experience ourselves as blunted. We are not in touch with our own aliveness. We cannot touch our own juice. We go to work and tend the house with an automaticity that renders the tasks devoid of meaning. We remind ourselves how we ought to be grateful for the largess that we have, for the good husbands, mothers, children, for the secure home and upcoming retirement, but none of these reminders really comfort. External barometers of health and happiness and all the safety and security in the world are cold comfort when the thrill is gone.
We need some numbness I suppose. There is only so much we can tolerate of ourselves and of that juice. Like Sheila we become overwhelmed by ourselves: by the painfulness of our own feelings or the taboo in our own desires, and then we need something to forget. We may not use prescription pharmaceuticals to manage that but I would argue that all of us use work, relationships and our own inner ability to shut-down or open up as ways of titrating how alive we are and how much we are living versus existing. Like Sheila, I think many of us alternately choose numbness or aliveness, sometimes for weeks or months. Other times there is no choice and aliveness or numbness claims us.
Perhaps what I repeat most often to myself and my patients in one form or another is this: we need our wild side. We need it as much as we need our sanity and we need the two to know and live with each other. Inasmuch as being organized and moving forward with our lives is important, so is being in touch with the cry for something more. We get our juice, that thrill from our wildness. Easy to forget, if we are valued and relied upon by our outer world and our jobs for predictability and efficiency. In the current cultural zeitgeist that hugely values control and productivity, I feel we are losing tolerance for our own wildness, our own most primal desires and feelings. We have become so efficient and focused on keeping track of our tasks that we lose or risk losing track of our selves.
If I stopped to reflect upon why I can’t write a word on the computer I might realize that there is a sea of pent-up emotion that I have been admirably concealing all morning in the interest of meeting the deadline for that piece of writing. The thrill is not gone, there is just something in me that won't let me get to it. When the thrill is gone we are usually just dammed up, the beavers of our own protective defenses holding us back from the lush wetlands that lie just beyond.
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