There's no Off switch for writers.

Something I've been contemplating a fair bit, and you may have heard me mention in previous posts, is the relationship I have as a writer with the people in my life. There's all sorts of jokes going about online about writers "putting you into their books". But that's no joke, and I don't think it's as cute or easy as it's made out to be.

I analyze myself a lot and realize how helpful my personal relationships are to my writing. Obviously. I take certain things, like little personality kinks or endearing weirdnesses about the people that I care about and write them obsessively at times into my books, my stories, my blogs. I keep mementos of people everywhere, and to this day, I consider some of my favorite texts to be related also to great suffering.

What I mean to say, love, strange encounters, and perhaps suffering are (I believe) great fodder for the artist. I find sometimes I enshrine moments or low points in my life and draw on them a great deal in my writing subsequently.

I think some of my favorite texts have come from that sort of thing, and I'm very proud of them. I look at them and think wow. Well that was kinda worth it all, wasn't it?

Except I'm starting to wonder, increasingly, how feasible sanity is. For me to write some of the texts I consider of value, I have to pick apart, to open wounds, to awaken certain dogs that would be best left sleeping. So I'll sit here for an hour, write something I'm very happy with, pieces (I believe are) quite moving. But then, when that's done, there's no putting it aside. It's a tricky bridge to transition between work, when you're more or less invited to pick apart yourself, and the rest of living where you're a person who has moved on and matured and is trying to get on with things.

Can you have it both ways?

I recently saw the superb Severance, at @ladyrebecca 's behest, and let me just say, if you haven't... do. It's fantastic. But it does raise an interesting premise - the off switch. Splitting the part of you that works and the rest, the "real" you. And I realize it's quite a different question for people in more normal jobs. For the main character, for instance, it's very much a question of sparing himself the onslaught of inescapable emotions.

Although, of course, as the characters themselves find out eventually, (and is no great spoiler) that doesn't really work. You can't be only half of yourself, which leads me to believe my botched attempts to separate my writer-self (very in her emotions, instinctual) from my "real" self are just misfires.

Wrong.

There's this idea that if I didn't go looking, the bad things would lie quietly dormant. Except maybe they wouldn't. Maybe my writing them or returning to examine how I feel about them just draws them closer to the surface, which is, in a way, a good thing.

The more I sit with this, the more I realize it's not so much a matter of whether I bring these emotions into reality or not. Just to surface. They all already exist in me. I might keep certain narratives alive for the sake of inspiration, but the thing is, they'd live in me anyway. I just wouldn't be so aware of them.

There's so much talk about artists and the way art feeds on pain, emotions, experience. Except, what I'm starting to notice is, those are non-negotiables. The fact that I write allows me, or perhaps forces me to look them straight in the eye, whereas without writing, I might successfully bury them.

Some people go months, years, even decades not looking who they really are in the eye. But personally, I spend long hours every week examining myself in all my mess, all my pitifulness, but also all my wonder. All that complexity that makes us real. On account of my writing, I know exactly where my obsessions lie, what parts I'm still not over, which hurt and which brought joy. Which never counted much towards either.

And there's such wealth, too. It's an endless opportunity, this sort of living, to search for the good. Because in my life, you may have been someone bad or bland or anything, but in my stories, I'll look for the ways in which you were exciting or a hero, the rhythm of your own story you might've been telling.

And it lets me know a little more I think. It gives me an insight that perhaps otherwise I would be too impatient to earn for myself. Into you. Into what makes us the same, but also different.

I think sometimes what a shame it is, the people who live on in me as sea shanties. Heavy, each. Take up space in my memory if I want to remember the chorus while at sea. But it's also such a treasure. I get to see people like they're music and I have an excuse to love them all, even when I shouldn't. It's quite a perplexing thing.