Burnout (What We Write Doesn’t Matter)
A week ago, I took ketamine for the first time. I had heard it helps with depression, which I have been struggling with my whole life but within the last three years has been especially difficult. I have credited my depression to many things: my marriage fell apart in 2019 and I was officially divorced in February of this year. Life after marriage is always a difficult transition, no matter the circumstances, but it coinciding with the pandemic also seemed to be a contributing factor, although my relationship to the pandemic has been, well, complicated, plus I have spent most of this year in economic uncertainty as I have been in and out of jobs. I also turned 37 and have been contemplating what exactly I want out of the rest of my life professionally and personally. I have tried to start different projects and companies and they have all collapsed. I have had a couple of relationships break up as well. So, there are several candidates for why I feel this pervasive sense of inertia in my life, but particularly in my writing. I have written only one full length work, in this case a play, since 2018, and that play I have decided needs to be rewritten. I have written freelance articles regularly the last three months, but only because I’m paid for them and they are also very short pieces (500 words max). I have had a few bursts of creative energy but nothing that carries through, and even when I write a short piece that I like, I have no initiative to do anything with it.
Which is why I took ketamine. I wanted to understand why my brain is not functioning the way it used to. When the drug kicked in, I spent nearly the entire time reliving the period between 2012 and 2018, when I was representing writers around the country and overseas, when I was travelling to do events with those authors and to promote my own books as well. In those years I released dozens of articles, short stories, and five books. The majority of those events and travel were to New York City, where I made some of my closest and most meaningful friendships. I walked through these memories and felt as though I were walking the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I smelled all the smells and more profoundly, the energy and happiness I get whenever I am in the city overcame me. I recorded my experience and at one point said, “I was myself then. I was an artist.” And then the memories turned dark when I focused in on a night I spent bar hopping with one of my dearest friends, Patrick Dalton, whose writing and life ended in 2018. Sure enough, I have barely been able to finish anything ever sense. In that state, I felt broken, because while Patrick’s suicide had many causes, the one that my mind couldn’t shake was that while myself and our mutual friend Mike Shields celebrated his work and published it on our platforms, Patrick was unknown. He produced beautiful and edgy stories, with echoes of Bukowski, and nobody outside our circle cared.
A couple months ago I reconnected with Zach Oliver, with whom I co-founded Aignos Publishing, and who was responsible for getting my first solo book, Traveler’s Rest, published (I co-wrote a book with Jean Blasiar that came out in 2011 but I don’t consider it my own). Zach has left the literary world and I was talking to him about my own struggles staying in the game, and he expressed his frustrations with working so hard to get books he believed in media attention and sales only to see them flounder in the public eye. One of those books was forged out of a tragedy, the murder of our friend and Aignos editor Zane Plemmons Rosales. As a tribute to him, we made There is No Cholera in Zimbabwe, a collection of essays from around the world detailing human rights abuses and state corruption. The book was a labor of love and several of the writers wrote from exile. Despite our best efforts, the book was released with little to no fanfare. The failure of this tribute to our friend hit both of us hard, as did the indifference experienced by writers we loved such as Carlos Aleman and Theresa Varela. Why spend weeks and months developing and championing writers when after all that effort the best they could do was an appearance at a book fair or a review that nobody read? How many royalty checks could we send to writers for $2, $6, or if they were lucky, $20? Even when one event sold out, the next three would barely move more than a copy or two. We had seen firsthand how fruitless and vacuous social media self-promotion is. And it felt even moreso after Patrick died. What the fuck are we doing? Even if our books are about IMPORTANT subjects. Even if we are promoting a MARGINALIZED VOICE or showing that a community MATTERS, what are those things other than catchphrases in a new industry, Diversity Inc? Activism that starts as a tweet and ends up a shirt sold at a march. Movements that amount to a fist pump and a pat on the back while the world as we knew it and as we know it continues unabated. Delusional optimists so desperate for validation they’ll take whatever scraps they can get and then complain about them while they eat them up. Why tell a story when nobody will read it who isn’t related to us or wasn’t already a friend? Why pimp yourself out to engorge on crumbs? How shameless do we need to be?
The last thing he said to me, via text, was that the pain was unbearable. Sure, physical pain was involved, but I know it was deeper than that. In his absence I have had a hard time letting go of that pain. Not just in losing a friend but in losing a passion. I obviously am still writing, but I’m crippled by a PCP pipe and some bricks. What is being smashed is the soft tissue of my brain, where my willpower lives. I see no point in telling stories, in making up characters, in promoting the broken shards of my heart. It won’t bring back Zane or Patrick or free anyone from exile or cure world hunger or do anything of value. I don’t even think it will inspire anything but pity, which I have no time for. I have a life to live, and a compulsion to document it in writing, but I can’t say I fully grasp any meaning behind it all. I can’t bring myself to join the masses of writers filling tables at convention halls speaking passionately on their latest fairy tale with tits and dragons or supernatural romance or social justice tome. I would never want to be a member of the club whose peak in life is being mentioned in a tweet. Even the little corners of hope, those first time writers who are genuinely thrilled to have anyone read their book. Their happiness sincere and not yet tainted by the industry bullshit. I’d find even more hope, however, in the first time writer who gets in front of a crowd, tells a bunch of dirty jokes and quasi-horrific stories from their life, and at the very end remembers they have a book in front of them, casually mentions, Oh yeah, get a copy if you’d like, or not, I don’t give a fuck, and before anyone can respond, heads to the nearest bar. I’d like to think Patrick would have been that kind of writer. Maybe I should be. Embrace the void, and let it heal my soul.