You, the talented & mentally ill.
Three things happened recently that seem to have crashed together like a highway pile-up but, probably more accurately, happened like galaxies wheeling into a slow but supermassive tangle. My house took on an inch of standing-water damage for the second time in two years (different circumstances, same soaked outcome), I discovered that an old hobby-writing acquaintance is now a NYT bestselling author, and I dug up the short stories I wrote in college.
There’s also the dark gravitational reminder — the vibe that everyone thought 2012 was going to have but we just mixed up the last two digits — that time is up. Maybe we won’t make it to heat wave Zoe. We may not even make it to heat wave Mary.
These things happened and I decided to hang up two time-consuming hobbies to take my writing more seriously. I wrote two short stories. One was swiftly rejected by a speculative magazine. The disappointment was thrilling, the way the pride was bitter when I looked up from one of those college stories I’d forgotten I’d written and said, “I actually. . . liked that!”
Maybe I imagined I was talking to my associate Creative Writing professor whose primary reaction to me was bemused tolerance. Or to the version of myself who’d written the story and, worn out from struggling through core courses and the gross mistake of thinking I wanted a Writing-Communications double major, was eager to accept acceptableness and crawl back into bed.
In college, I was anxious, lonely, and probably brain-damaged from years of untreated depression. I wish even one advisor or professor had explained to me the reasons I should have applied to an MFA program. At the time, I thought MFAs were just a way to secure one’s teaching safety-net. I thought I’d be more motivated without a back-up, that I’d never write my own prose if I was busy teaching it as my day-job, and I was convinced it was better to shake academia’s pretentious stranglehold off my on creativity.
If someone had leaned forward, made direct and sober eye contact with me, and said, “You’re talented and, if you’re serious about writing, you’ll need the connections and intensive work on your craft,” (shout out to the one professor I never even had a class with, who murmured to me in the hall “You write really well,” like it was a secret) maybe I wouldn’t have rolled myself up in pillows and kicked myself down a slope straight to the bottom of depression, but just as probably I still would’ve.
I groped around a world that got increasingly fuzzier with a brain squeezed of its last drop of dopamine by a 9–6 technical writing job, working for a small-business run by a family of Seventh Day Adventists who didn’t like me to push climate change too much when I was composing Environmental Science courses for middle schoolers.
College finished, alone in the world, making my own money!, the first ever person in my father’s bloodline to go to college, the second-ever in my mother’s!, launched into the heavens by little Kaleidoscope-program golden star stickers, this was it! I made it, and my reward was being trapped between four walls with my louder-than-ever, deeply mentally ill inner voice!
It took me too long to convince myself my mind was worth saving.
Reading those stories felt like picking up a bookmarked page from a book I’d forgotten I’d owned. I did try. I did pour myself into those stories. That self was viciously self-loathing, isolated, and obsessive— crying for help, even. But seeing that I was there, bleeding what faith I had left into this artform, made me want to do right by that person. She trusted that someone would give her a crutch, a flashlight, a rusty key, the most fleeting mentorship, even if it was a future self she had to wait years for.
