“I don't respond well to mellow,” Alvy Singer tells an exasperated Annie Hall during their ill-fated trip to the West Coast. “…if I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot.”
“Neurotic” is most creatives’ default setting — the label we wear like a badge of honor. Normal, well-adjusted people might have long-lasting marriages, but they probably don’t make interesting movies.
I’m no Woody Allen (*winces*), but I have spent the majority of my life addicted to my own anxiety.
I am floored by the people who respond with a genuine “Great!” when you ask how they are doing. Great? Exclamation point? My own life is punctuated by question marks. If I’m not ceaselessly questioning, ruminating, yearning, then aren’t I as good as dead? If I let my mind relax for even a moment, will it ever produce another useful or creative thought again?
Once, I was lying in bed with a boyfriend on a Sunday morning, moaning about an essay I had to write for class. I wouldn’t shut up. He pulled out some pot from his nightstand.
“No, no,” I protested. “I have to get up. I have to write. I have no time to do it. I’m going to fail the class, and then what?” Finally, he left the bed and shot back at me: “Just do it or don’t. Stop talking about it.”
Well! Obviously, he didn’t understand the Creative Process! Steps 1 through 5: Stress about The Thing. Steps 6 through 9: Complain about doing The Thing. Step 10: Do The Thing.
***
For the neurotic person, there is a natural pull toward journalism as a profession. Why stop writing essays when you graduate from college, when you could spend the rest of your life hunched over a laptop, shoulders raised to your ears, simultaneously convinced that you are the most brilliant and stupidest person who ever lived, as you race against the clock on a story that three or 3,000 people might have an opinion about?
My best days working in daily news felt a lot like my best days working at a service job: There’s running around, and trauma bonding, and bouts of extreme focus as you try to get from Point A to Point B without losing your shit. Then, it’s over. You go to bed worn out and satisfied. You did The Thing.
My worst days in a newsroom gave me insomnia, migraines, and panic attacks. They transformed me into the worst version of myself: Short-tempered, high-strung, paranoid. My work week technically started on Tuesdays, but the anxiety would start to set in on Sunday evenings. By Monday afternoon, as I watched the workday play out on Slack and news headlines accumulate on my Twitter feed, the familiar feeling of dread would take over my entire body. I would arrive in the newsroom on Tuesday morning, already scatterbrained and stressed, frantically trying to catch up with an impossible list of demands, as a familiar refrain played in my head: “This is what you wanted.”
I left my newsroom job months ago. For long after, every time a building burned in Philadelphia, I had the familiar urge to run toward it: Who do we have to cover this? Can they take photos? Has anyone called the health department yet? Then, I’d stop myself. No one was paying me to panic any more.
So I replaced the stress of daily journalism with the stress of looking for a new job. Even though I had steady freelance gigs, decent savings, and parents who would never let me end up homeless, my anxiety wouldn’t rest. What if it all falls apart? What if I can’t pay my rent? What if I never succeed at anything ever again? I realize now that the panic felt familiar and protective, a cozy blanket I could wrap myself inside of when everything else in my life seemed uncharacteristically quiet and stagnant.
I had once again tricked myself into believing that worrying about not doing the work was as good as doing the work itself.
***
Then, one beautiful weekday in March, I was biking to a park in the middle of the afternoon, and I had a revelation: “I don’t have to deal with anybody’s shit right now.” I breathed a great big sigh of relief, realizing I had fulfilled a dream that I hadn’t even known I wanted. I was content. And calm.
After many professional starts, stops, and dead-ends, I have been working for myself for months now, and it is going well. I make my own schedule. I run along the Delaware River most mornings. I have befriended every barista at my favorite neighborhood coffee shop and the dogs who live on my tree-lined city block. I have competing deadlines and long to-do lists, but none of the work feels overwhelming or menial. I know that X hours of work directly equates to Y amount of dollars, which gives me motivation and purpose. I have time to breathe and to think, but not so much time to overthink. There are no Slack messages and few emails to interrupt my days. There are no surprise check-ins with managers. There are no fires to put out or burning buildings to run into.
These days, I no longer think that neuroticism is a prerequisite for a fulfilling career or creative life. Although, I sometimes miss the excitement and the chaos of breaking news, I miss the community of a newsroom, and I wonder what that says about what I should do next. I could return to an intense office job, but at what cost? While I’d like to believe that there are staff positions with high stakes and high rewards that aren’t inherently toxic, competitive, and stress-inducing, I’m not really sure if it’s true. (Emi Nietfeld has a wonderful recent piece in the Atlantic about this tension, which I completely related to.)
What I do know is that this: Living in a constant state of anxiety did push me toward success in certain moments, but more often than not, it left me frazzled and paralyzed. For the first time in my life, the voices in my head are quieter, my steps are lighter, and my work ethic hasn’t suffered from it. In fact, there is less contemplating and more doing. I may have mellowed out, but I haven’t gone soft. And that’s a good place to be.
P.S. I did not intend to publish a post about “mellowing out” on 4/20, but here we are.
P.S.S. If you subscribe to Stopgap, you are the best, and I am eternally grateful for your support. If you’d like to support this newsletter even further (and help pay for my cat’s newly-prescribed anxiety meds), then you should consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I’m not entirely sure how you do that (Substack is still mysterious to me), but you can poke around on the website, or try this link.
Until next time.
Xo,
Lauren