Oh How I Envy The Dead Lady Writers

Lately I’ve been obsessed with women writers who killed themselves because I’m a woman writer who wants to kill herself.

Don’t be alarmed. This isn’t a cry for help in essay form. I’m too pig-headed to give just up yet. But most days I don’t want to be here because most days are simply agonising.

I wake up more tired than when I went to sleep, as though some sinister Sandman has sprinkled me with an evil magic sleepy dust. I wake up and my head hurts, my body aches and I’m in a panic at the thought of the day ahead of me, the life ahead of me. I wake up and all I want to do is sleep.

And I’ve been this way for years.

We often hear of people “falling into” a depression but it wasn’t like that for me. I wrote my way into one. And in some ways, I did it knowingly and willingly. I thought if I chose to go there I could also choose when it was time to leave.

When I decided to write my memoir, Grief Girl, about my parents dying when I was fourteen I had no idea what I was getting myself in to. As a former journalist I thought I could “knock out a book” in six months. How hard could it be? I’d survived my greatest childhood fear, I’d moved on, grown up, made a life for myself, so writing about the past should be a cinch.

How little I knew of myself when I started. Unbeknownst to me I retraumatised myself. Going over and over and over the same painful events. I think I have relived, in great detail, the night I was told my parents had been in an accident and that my mother was dead and my father was on his way to the hospital, more than 200 times.

All this writing and reliving was harrowing and exhausting but I kept going for years, thinking my brain could take such a beating because I’d convinced myself that I was untouchable. I was strong, I was invincible.

I was wrong.

My brain had other plans, taking on a life of its own. And now it betrays me and deceives me, it tells me that life is meaningless so what’s the point of anything, it tells me I am worthless and the people around me would be better off if I were dead, it tells me that I have no talent and shouldn’t even bother writing.  

None of this is anything new. I know that. The great novelists’, poets’, musicians’, painters’ works are filled with all that I feel. My pain is not unique although on the worst days I feel so terribly alone. On my worst days I feel robbed. Robbed of my ability to live fully, to make the most out of life, to function, and to do the thing I want to do most of all, and that is to write.

Every day I sit here at my computer and I try to write. I’m not avoiding it as we writers famously do, I don’t have writer’s block. I’m ready and willing but the problem is that most days I feel as though I’ve eaten a couple of sleeping tablets for breakfast and am fighting to stay awake. I am a sleepwalking zombie, one of the walking dead, although the zombies we see on TV and in films are more alive than I am. Zombies can walk great distances yet I have trouble walking to the letterbox at the front of my house. Zombies keep going and going and going. I can’t even get started.

Just writing these words is an excruciating exercise in frustration. You read them and hopefully they flow, one sentence leads to the next but for me sitting here typing, every word is a mammoth effort. Nothing flows. I don’t even trust my own thoughts. I could be writing absolute gobbledygook for all I know. My brain aches, literally. Not a headache, an actual ache inside my skull as though my brain matter is badly bruised.

It’s not just depression but the drugs that were prescribed to treat it for I am deemed treatment resistant after having tried almost every antidepressant on the market. The last one I tried made everything worse and getting off it resulted in two years laying on the sofa, unable to function, with symptoms ranging from full body hives and difficulty breathing to an inability to stand upright for more than 10 seconds at a time. For the longest time, years in fact, I didn’t write. The physical challenges and the mental fog were so bad I couldn’t read let alone write.

Then and now I think of all I could achieve if only my brain wasn’t always switched to sleep mode.

And that’s when I start to think about Virginia and the rocks in her pocket, Sylvia with her head in the oven, and Anne sitting in her idling car as the fumes filled her lungs.  

I think about all they did before they decided they just couldn’t take it anymore.  

How did they do it? How were they so prolific, writing with such clarity, precision, and passion?

I have The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton sitting on my desk and it’s a 615-page brick. So many poems. So many words strung together so beautifully, artfully.

Virginia Woolf’s novels, her non-fiction, her journals stare at me from my bookshelf. So prolific. Page after beautiful, skilful page.  

And Sylvia Plath, her collected journals alone, at 674 pages, put me to shame.

Yes, they each had the rarest of talents but they also shared an illness. I envy both.

My envy of these women is my own kind of madness, I know that. But despite the agony that lead to the most painful and final decision of all, I envy them. I want some of what they had. This is truly fucked up, but then so is depression.

I have enough experience with this illness to know that I do not see things as they truly are but knowing that does not make me wise to myself.

I envy the manic-depressives their mania because in that state they get things done. You read of writers, artists, musicians who churn out works in the manic state without the need of sleep or food or anything life sustaining. The mania feeds them. Yes, they eventually come crashing down, sometimes fatally, but for that brief moment in time, those days, those hours, they felt alive. Me, I’m dead all the time. Just one long arduous drudge. I am so desperate to feel awake.

I remember a time many years ago when I experienced a kind of mania, a time when I would stay up all night feeling alert and excited and the words would flow faster than I could type. My doctor had put me on a mix of contradictory drugs – antidepressants for my depression and stimulants for ADD (which I’ve since learnt was a side-effect of the antidepressant) so I was simultaneously taking uppers and downers. My poor brain was confused and a part of me loved it. I was up at all hours, alert, alive, awake, writing for hour upon hour without stopping. A few months’ worth of work in one sitting. Who needs sleep when there’s that?

And that’s how I imagine the manic states were for my much envied and beloved women writers.  

I know there is so much more to manic-depression/bipolar disorder and that it is a terrible, debilitating disease. I know my envy of the manic state is irrational and misguided.

I don’t have some romantic notion of how it must have been for them. The myth of the tortured artist and all that. Torture is torture no matter how it’s packaged. There is nothing romantic about being in so much pain that the only way out is death.

As Sylvia Plath said in The Bell Jar, “Death must be so beautiful… to forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”     

But despite the daily torment I am not ready for death just yet. So what am I to do?

I wrote my way into depression, maybe I can write my way out?

I read book after book about writing, writers’ processes, inspiring quotes from writers I admire, and they all help lift me for a moment but nothing sticks, nothing slays or subdues the dragon. But should I call it a dragon when really it is a sedentary beast lacking all imagination?  Depression is an irony in itself. It’s powerful and stronger than I am and yet it has no energy. A force without physical force, a storm without power. I guess that’s why they call it a fog. All grey and quiet and slow moving but enveloping everything, making everything hazy, unclear.

Recently I read Light the Dark – Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (edited by Joe Fassler) and within its pages I found a way to navigate the fog. It’s the last essay in the collection, Random Joy by Neil Gaiman, who says that if you go back and compare the writing done on good days and bad days it is usually impossible to tell the difference.

“You know intellectually that some of these pages were written on glorious days. Some of them were written on terrible days. Some of them were written on days when, as far as you were concerned, you had the worst, most appalling writer’s block in the world, and you were just putting down any old nonsense to try and get something down. And some of them were put down on magic days. The truth is, you can’t tell. It all reads like you. It’s all part of the same book.”

That struck a chord with me, so I tried it. I monitored whether something was written on a good, bad, or terrible day. Then much later I read over all that I had written and was shocked to discover that some of my best writing happened on the bad and terrible days, the days when I was convinced I was wasting my time.  

This changed everything.

I still find myself seeking out the miserable ones, the writers who were so filled with anguish at one point or other that it became legend – Dorothy Parker, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, Richard Brautigan, William Styron, Ernest Hemmingway… the list goes on. These fellow sufferers give me comfort, they remind me I don’t have to be well in order to write. These tortured souls didn’t wait until they were better, happier, more content. They wrote in spite of their pain and torment.

There’s a lesson in that I think.

I may never be completely well but I am a damn sight better when I try, for in not trying I am giving in to that voice that works so hard to convince me that it’s all for nothing. And what if it’s wrong? After all, my brain can’t be trusted. That I know for sure.    

 

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Erin Vincent is the author of the acclaimed memoir Grief Girl (published by Random House) which is now in its 11th printing. Grief Girl was named a New York Public Library’s Best Book for the Teen Age and was an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults Nominee.

Erin is also a highly respected journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Australian, Marie Claire magazine, and Grazia magazine.

Follow her on Twitter  https://twitter.com/erin_heremeroar

Find out more about her on her website https://www.heremeroar.com/

About GRIEF GIRL

It’s just another October day until Erin’s parents are hit by a speeding tow truck. Mom dies instantly. Dad dies one month later, after doctors assure Erin he’s going to make it. Now Erin and her sister are left to raise their baby brother—and each other.

This is Erin Vincent’s gripping true story of how one moment tears a family apart and how love and strength come together to rebuild what was lost. Grief Girl will break your heart and then fill you with hope, time and time again.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing