Hello and welcome to Clear The Lens. My name is Meem and I am the crazy writer who’s in charge of this blog. I don’t know everything but I am a know-it-all and I will unfailing believe I am right in everything I say until proven wrong. But I’m certainly fun and I have a weird sense of humour so if that’s your thing, welcome. And if my sense of humour isn’t your thing, well, that’s your character flaw, not mine.
So let’s get onto today’s discussion i.e. why authors all seem to have horribly tragic lives or suffer from some form of mental illness or other. And let’s remember, the writer of this kooky blog (also known as ME) suffers from a multitude of mental illnesses and has certainly had a tragic life.
But why? Are writers just cursed to forever experience the worst of humanity? Are we doomed to never find true love and always be disappointed? Are we all like Mary Shelley and enjoy fornicating on top of our mother’s graves? (If I ever get that bad, I invite anyone willing, to shoot me).
You’re Not A Writer Unless At Some Level, You Want To Escape
By its very nature, writing requires you to get stuck in your own head. And I’m not talking about the writing you HAVE to do. I’m talking about the writing that floats through your mind and tortures you until you put it down on the page. That sort of writing is the worst sort of abusive, controlling lover. It is the sort of writing that will never leave you, that will haunt you and scream and scream until you let it out.
By our very nature, we as writers, want to reimagine the world. Even if we have a tendency to write non-fiction, there is always a misconstruction in it (whether we admit it or not). We just can’t help ourselves. Even when we claim to be telling the truth, we are almost always lying, even if it’s only slightly.
So why do writers have such tragic lives? Because it takes a certain level of trauma to reach a point where you are trapped in your own mind. And let’s face it, that’s essentially what being a writer is all about. Being a writer isn’t about getting published or having people read your book. No. Being a writer is all about being taken hostage by your own mind.
You get so immersed in your own stories and ideas that reality and fiction or reality and the mind become interchangeable. And no well-adjusted person does that.
Writing Is A Protest
Here’s the thing, no one chooses to become a writer. If you’ve ever come across someone who said they wanted to become a writer when they were younger but changed their mind or they just don’t have time, ignore them. They’re not true writers. They’re merely creative people who had a fascination with writing.
Because a true writer can never escape. A true writer could be stuck in abject poverty yet their mind would still feed them stories of other worlds or stories of their own world filtered by a mind that wants to escape. You cannot merely say “No, I just don’t have the time. I think I’ll choose another career and just stop writing”. Those are the words of someone who doesn’t truly care. Who merely wants to be praised on a few artfully phrased words on a page. Words that don’t matter to them because if it did, they would be driven mad by not being able to write.
Just look at all the Great writers. They went through poverty, abuse, war or any other decrepit thing the world had to offer. They could not escape their own mind and they did not want to face the reality of the real world. No, what they wanted was to be caught up in a fantasy (and remember, no matter how real a story appears, it is always a fantasy).
But this overwhelming desire for escapism isn’t born from nothing. It’s born from trauma and helplessness. Yes, folks. We, all writers, suffer from helplessness. We create elaborate words on a page because we are trapped and we know we cannot escape. Our prison is the world we live in. We write because it is the only way we cope with the great number of thoughts we have.
How I Escape
And you may at this point think that I’m being pretentious. But that would require me to believe that I was superior and I most certainly am not. I am bitter and petty and if I had the power to make my abusers and enemies suffer, I most certainly would. In fact, I am the sort of petty that will remember an unkind phrase from a decade prior. I do not forget and I only forgive when faced with true remorse.
I give my protagonists power because I have lived through life powerless. I make bad things happen to bad people because I know the truly bad people in this world will never suffer the way they made me suffer. That’s just the way the world is. It is cruel and it makes some of us miserable so that others may flourish.
So no, I am not better than my non-writer counterparts. No writer is better than their non-writer counterparts. Our only superiority comes from our ability to recognise how truly terrible this world is. So yes, writing is a protest. It is a protest against a world that hurts us yet goes on unapologetically.
When I write, I never think about the real world. Unlike many of my peers, I don’t pretend that my stories are reality, I know they’re fantasy. And so yes, I include magic and soulmates and mermaids. But at the same time, my protagonists are often brown or black women living in a world where they are not victims. Unlike in the real world, even if they face discrimination, it doesn’t stop them from achieving their full potential. My protagonists are able to enjoy all the benefits of power, love, desirability and revenge. And of course, sexism simply does not exist. Why? Because I do not choose it to exist.
If writing is to be my escape and my fantasy, I refuse to allow the real world to spoil any aspect of it. Discrimination will only exist so far as I say it should exist. It will have a purpose and when it is meant to reflect reality, it will be heart breaking but it will never be insurmountable. My protagonists will always rise above the challenges in their society in a way that I never will be able to.
At this point, I am sure it is abundantly clear that I am unsatisfied with my life. But you should already know that from the moment that I tell you that I’m a writer. Why would anyone choose to immerse themselves into building their own worlds and people unless they were thoroughly dissatisfied with the world they were stuck in.
You see, it’s not that being a writer causes one to develop trauma. Rather, it is trauma that forces one to become a writer. Trauma that is so powerful and overbearing that it makes it hard to even breathe in the real world. So what do we do? We create stories. We write and write and write until our fictional worlds drown out the trauma.
Writing Is Not Freedom But Rather The Illusion Of It
Try as I might, I will never write often enough to fully drown out the trauma. It will creep into my every word and somehow, that trauma, will make the stories I write, better. We put so much of ourselves in the stories we write that books become almost like friends to readers. They love our book though they may never know why. They may never fully recognise the monster hidden beneath our words, exposing how truly detached we are from both reality and our own mind.
That’s why so many of the great writers had tragic lives. They convinced themselves that their writing would be enough. But I know better. I know that the writing will never cure me. It will never truly cause me to forget.
But it does not signify because that is not the point of writing. The point of writing is to escape, if only momentarily, so that when we are pulled back into the real world, it is somewhat bearable. And we write because otherwise the trauma would overpower us and our heads would fill with nothing more than screams.
Disclaimer: If you can relate to what I’m saying, you need therapy. And I say this as someone who has been in therapy since I was 12. I am not a well-adjusted person. If you can relate to me, please seek professional help as I have.
