how they're wired up

A Brief Preparatory Disclaimer:
To all you MBC and A-town people who don't know my testimony from the last half-year: You will probably be a little disquieted by the following. I love you guys, and hope you still love me, too.
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I think that a lot of my destructive behavior of my entire life, and especially of last semester, was due in large part (besides, of course, the general sin nature of man), to Earnest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This has always been something I'm loathe, as well as a little embarrassed, to admit, outwardly or inwardly, but today, while reading On Writing by Stephen King, I reached the part where he talks about his drug addiction and alcoholism and blames his former philosophy of the writer as addict on those two as well. It, well, it made me feel a lot less ridiculous. At least reducing the ridiculous enough for me to write about it.

Most of my favorite writers have either died prematurely from their destructive living, or killed themselves. I had a love-hate relationship with The Bell Jar because while I loved the writing and was utterly convinced by it (I wonder why), it made me feel like I was going crazy right along with her, and I had to stop reading it half way through. Two of my favorite authors that didn't kill themselves are GK Chesterton and CS Lewis, but both of them had a relationship with Jesus. And even still, Chesterton smoked like a stack (though they had no idea about the health risks from smoking tobacco back then, I'm pretty sure).

In any case-- in his book, King outlines the "Hemingway Defense" as going something like this:

" As a writer, I am a sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can. " ...

Now obviously, I'm not a man. But I've always sort of been backed into the corner of trying to be tough girl, able to hold my own and run with the big boys. Sort of subconsciously, I imagine I adopted that image. For me, it was either become Jane Austen (a fate worse than death, though I'm a big fan of a few of her novels) or learn to grasp the true wit and grit of Hemingway and Vonnegut (who didn't kill himself, but talked about death way too much for a wholly healthy person).

King goes on to say this:

"The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time... Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are ... self-serving... Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter".

I sort of bought into that, I think. Not that I was ever drinking while writing (or vice versa)-- I couldn't manage those two at the same time-- or doing drugs (I've never struggled with or, for that matter, used any drugs because on a completely basic, areligious way, too many people have died and they're too expensive), but I always think about it. I think that knocking out that short story I wrote four pages of weeks ago but haven't touched since would be a lot easier if I was also knocking down a bottle cheap red wine. Never mind the fact that I'm not even 19 yet, never mind the fact that a terrible and destructive strain of alcoholism runs in my veins from two different streams from as far back as my family can remember itself. It still lurks in my head. As a recently reformed and devoted Christian still deailing with this crap, you can imagine, I pray a lot.

My reformation was genuine. I'm really in love with Jesus in a big, real way, authentically, for probably the first time in my life (despite having professed that for a lot longer than a few months ago). But while God promises to be there for us in our struggles, He doesn't make the struggles don't go away. I still want to chain smoke a pack of Clove lights or Camel Ultras while scribbling desperately in a Moleskine (Just as a clarifying aside: smoking is not really the big issue. The issue for me is an addictive personality, and the addiction is the problem, not the smoking itself). And what's really bad about it all is that that particular mindset is entirely irrational-- I wrote both of my two best short stories completely sober, without a drag to be had, on a train. God wants me to know the struggles are there, but also stop looking at them and seeing how big and scary they are, and instead look at Him, and see how much bigger and scarier, but vastly more loving He is.

So that's me, trying to be a writer and a Christian and a teenage girl (a whole other set of exciting and enjoyable problems)....

I can never think of good last sentences, so I'll just say that it's a gorgeous day and we should all be outside, and that Ryan Adam's Cold Roses is a really brilliant album that you should listen to, and close with that.


<3 H