Lately I have been unhinged. (Or I’ve “come undone” as The Guess Who would say; that is the phrase I’m hearing in my head right now). This word gets thrown around a lot these days, and it might be one of the few times where a slang word is actually one of those words that is literally a real word that means exactly what it means. As a small example: I was reading the Dostoyevsky novel The Adolescent recently, and the word made an appearance in it. Being “mentally unhinged” is a phrase that has been around forever, but it’s been getting lots of use lately for some reason. A Google trends search reveals that it has risen in popularity in the last couple of years. Maybe this is just another one of those signs that things are literally getting crazier and crazier as time goes on. Everything is a mess, and we’re all unhinged from time to time.
Anyway, back to my topic of my unravelling. (See? That’s how unhinged I’ve become lately. Can’t even focus properly). I had a very productive January in terms of my writing goals, and then in late January I returned to using the internet regularly, (and Twitter) after a short period away from it. I discussed The Internet Cleanse thing awhile go; I was in the process of doing that for a bit. (If you ever see me disappear from social media it’s usually because of that cleanse theory). Then it snowed a couple times in February, I’ve been stuck indoors a lot with my boomer parents, and since then IDK what the fuck is wrong with me. My productivity slowed down, and I lost the spark. This is not a big deal or a surprise, because I have many periods in my life like this where I feel shitty and lose the spark of motivation I had previously for some inexplicable reason. It’s almost like catching some kind of sickness no different than covid. I have no real explanation for why I become unhinged from time to time, it just happens lol.
These are periods where I see no point in doing any kind of productive work, and instead I prefer to just sit around doing nothing. Reading a book, scrolling through news about collapse, or just generally in a state of depression, feeling bad about life, and wanting to die. I don’t know why or how it happens, it just happens. Like a bad fever you have to simply wait to sweat it all out of you or something, it just sucks. There are times where I alternate between, “I have hope for good things to happen in the world and life still,” and then other times where I sit around moping and think, “How could this happen? Why the fuck did that guy have to eat that bat? I wish I could go back to 2019😭😭😭.” Sometimes the grimness of the world becomes too much to bear, and this has a direct relation to my work output and mood.
These periods are always followed by another period of lots of productivity, and almost no bad feelings about the world and nothing but clear thoughts and a flow state. It is strange, but I guess this has sort of become my process I work in. Especially because I live with my parents, my creativity is often hampered by the various noises and stupid things they happen to be doing at any given moment. There are certain times where it feels impossible to work when your mom is nagging at you about some meaningless thing that doesn’t matter at all. I suppose someone who goes to therapy or something like that might be more equipped at dealing with these kinds of mood swings when they occur. It would be nice to have that kind of skillset, but for me I don’t think I’m that mature yet. I just get fully enveloped by the darkness of life for awhile, and it infects me like a bad cold or some shit.
To give you an idea of how much I’ve fallen behind in my goals lately: I am only 31,974 words into my new novel. That’s a word count I’ve been sitting on for a couple weeks now, and the bulk of those words were done in January. I did get some work done on the project this month, but it felt like starting an old Honda Accord in the winter. Or a rusty lawnmower running out of gas. But those similes make no sense: I wasn’t “rusty” because I was just working the month before, and I wasn’t “out of gas,” because I have lots of ideas for the project and a rough outline of things that need to happen in the narrative. It’s just a natural change I guess.
And even worse: I have fallen behind on writing my screenplay for this year. (I write one at the beginning of every year for screenwriting competitions; the deadlines give me a bit of an inspiration to finish it before then). I started doing the script for this year in January as well, and I’ve been working on the outline a bit more this month, but I stopped. I’ve only written one scene so far. Again: it’s not because I have no ideas or writer’s block. I know almost everything I want to happen in the script, with enough room to surprise me and make the missing blanks up as I go along to make it fun. But it’s just that the meaninglessness of life got to me once again, and I slipped up on my goals. What starts to happen is I can see the absolute futility and stupidity of working in a world as grim as this one, where there’s no hope or anything, and then I kinda doom myself instead of getting to work.
Sometimes I get into this weird state where my dopamine gets mixed up and switched from the joy I feel from doing my work, to the joy of fucking around on social media, or reading other people’s work. I have to remember to compartmentalize properly: the times I work and the times I enjoy other people’s work should be totally separate. I get into these patterns of depression where I don’t do shit except put stuff into my brain and chill instead of taking things out of my brain and working. I guess this is partly because the creative process can be a bit of a mental workout in some ways. Especially if it’s a written project, that can be mentally taxing and lead to burnout.
But I don’t think I’m burnt out or that’s the main source of it. I think after The Internet Cleanse I did, I got distracted again and my dopamine source got switched up too drastically. That stuff has a direct result on one’s work output, and I hate it. I know this all sounds crazy, but it’s 100% true I feel. I have to remember to make sure my work is the thing that is giving me pleasure more so than anything else, otherwise I’ll just be too comfortable with wasting away the hours on low effort rewards and activities.
Another area I fell behind in was exercise and meditation. I haven’t been working out 5 times a week like I usually do, and I haven’t been sticking to my daily 10 minute meditation routine. This makes things even worse of course, as I feel shittier and shittier as the bad habits pile on. Rest is necessary, but I have to remember there’s a thin line between getting to work, and doing things organically: I shouldn’t “wait” to feel “inspired,” I should just keep working through these dreadful moods and surroundings I’m in and get some work done.
Finally, the one thing I’d like to say about this is that, to a certain extent these periods are necessary and helpful. I’m not sure if I’m right about this, but I do believe experiencing extreme lows like I have been lately is directly related to the extreme bursts of doing lots of work for awhile. They are flipsides that seem to balance each other out. Like I said, a healthier person than myself might find a way to balance these two extremes a little better than I have been, but where is the fun in that? Haha. I doubt I would like being a regular guy who is in one state of mind constantly all the time, there needs to be variation or you’re not really alive. In the film The Beach Bum, there’s a line where Moondog explains, “I'm a bottom feeder. I gotta go low to get high.” There’s something about this that rings very true to me. In some ways, I feel like being unhinged for awhile can be healthy lol. Like you’re purging all your sins or some shit, getting something out of your system.
Anyway, that’s it for now on this topic. I guess I wanted to write this one to be 100% transparent about the process of becoming unhinged, lol.