Hold back my hair! I'm gonna spew!

With a continuation...

Every morning, for as long as I can remember, I've engaged in a ritual: my daily brain vomit. I took the exercise from a writing self-help book. The idea is, your brain is stuffed with so many thoughts that it's hard for you to jot down literary ideas. So you sit down with a pad and a pen and you write for 10 or 20 minutes straight. You don't stop, you don't think. It's free association, word association, nonsense, stream-of-conscious - whatever you wanna call it.

I have dozens of journals filled with my oozing mental yuckiness. Fears, ambitions, secrets (mine and my friends'), analyzations, stuff that I don't realize I'm thinking until I jot it down, et al. It's incredibly cathartic to have a place of purity in which to release your insides.

But writing is an art, and artists thrive on showing off their innards. This remains true and applies to me. There is a part of me that will forever be cloaked by mystery, and that is the part that allows me to write so feverishly. The more clear-headed I feel, the less like "myself" I feel, and the more likely I am to write innanely and/or mundanely. I guess this means that my most artistic self is fucked in the brain.


I met with Seli at the Shake Shack on Madison Ave. Over yummy goodies - I had the 'shroom burger, she had a cheeseburger - and a gorgeous park, we assessed our lives.

We were celebrating a monumentous occasion, one that I hope will live on in posterity after we've become famous writers: After much doubt and back-and-forth, Seli's going to Texas in a few weeks to live in Austin and pursue an MFA - and I'm ridiculously happy for her.

Me? Well, at the time, I was still in limbo about the next step in my life - should I stay or should I go? - and sought advice.

Seli is one of those rare gems: someone who understands her craft up and down, backwards and forwards, and still doesn't have a big head about it. She's the only female writer friend of mine whose bread and butter isn't poetry or fiction. (She primarily writes scripts.) And every time I read something of hers, I know it's genius. Oscar caliber genius.

Unfortunately, Seli's a perfectionist and nothing she writes will ever uphold her high standards. She is battered by self esteem issues, would-be mentors who constantly put her down, and her humble nature. But there, in the air, were words that confirmed what I already knew: someone else was bound to find and recognize her art. Someone else was bound to realize that she's golden.

Some things you should know about Seli:
- Three MFA programs accepted her, one of which (in Boulder, CO) I'm a HUGE fan of.
- Her mother has always been supportive of her creative ventures, mainly because her mother believes it's the only endeavor she can achieve. (A backhanded compliment?)
- I met her during my last year of HS.
- Seli's religious. Christian kind of religious. And though this might derail others from seeing people for who they are, this facet of Seli's personality only makes her more interesting.
- In college, she graduated magna cum laude (or was it suma cum laude?) , was on multiple dean's lists, and often finished a semester with a 4.0.
- She's incredibly sweet and susceptible to peoples' manipulations.
- She is so pure and innocent (in sooo many ways) that it's almost off-putting; it took me a long time to realize that she wasn't playing me for a fool - she really is as sincere as she makes herself out to be.

Because of all this, and the history we have, I knew that she was a good person with whom to share my thoughts - about my move to the Philippines, the next step in my writing career, the craziness that goes on in my head, et al.

We talked shop for a bit, mentioned writers we're currently really into, gabbed about writing styles that we find provocative, alluded to up-and-comers we know/the other might know. I mentioned an upcoming meeting with a writer-mentor-acquaintance who's a frequent contributor/freelance editor-writer for such publications as Vogue and Mademoiselle.

As the meal wound down and our topic of conversation drifted from writing to work to moving to family to friends to trust, we found ourselves sharing our personal histories with psycho analysis. I mentioned my fear that "I'm broken", and that it's that broken part of me that allows me to write. I told Seli that if that's the case, I don't want to be fixed. I don't want that part of me to stop working. I don't care if it means that my quality of life will not improve. I want to write and I want to write well. That's all I want.

By this time, we were on the subway station platform, waiting for our trains.

"I'm so afraid," I was saying. "My boss wants me to see a therapist, and even got her therapist to come to work so I could meet her. And I felt so good to meet this woman, and she felt so real, and something in me knew that she could heal me. Something in me knew that this woman was a healer.

"But I'm afraid that if I get healed, I won't be able to write like I've been writing. I feel it happening now, as my mind evolves and becomes more clear and defined. The pathos is gone. The struggle. The urgency."

Seli nodded in understanding. "Ya know," she said. "In college, I studied Walt Whitman for an entire semester, and I learned that despite all of his amazing writing, he was actually a very clear-cut, simple and happy man. He was also very mentally stable. There were no dark psychoses or melodramas in his past. He was not haunted... I guess it's possible to be mentally healthy and also write."

"But that's my fear - I have a feeling I'm not a Walt Whitman. I think I'm a Sylvia Plath or a Jack Kerouac. That that's who I am as a writer, and I need the craziness to fuel my art. I think I need the dissonance, the mystery, the excitement, the blind analyzation of everything."

Seli laughed at my frenzied pitch of voice.

"I know I must sound so stupid, saying that I'm willing to give up mental health in order to write..."

"No, no! I completely understand. I would, too..." She nodded furiously, then her eyes became quiet. "But, ya know, when I was suicidal in high school, I wrote poetry. And it was good poetry. I mean, I don't really write poetry, but people - adults, peers - would read it and think that it's a piece I took from the internet or something, and they were really surprised to hear that I wrote it. Well, I wrote this poetry when I was suicidal, and there was this allure to it, like you got caught up in it. It felt-"

"Urgent! Mysterious! Like true life, encapsulated in words, so people felt it."

"Yes! Yes, exactly!" Her eyes shifted, as if trying to figure out how best to state the following thought. "I know that I'll never be able to write like that again. That was a phase of my life, and now that I'm more mentally stable, I write more-"

"Concise! Precise! Analytic! Sterile!"

"Yes!" she laughed. "Exactly!"

"I know what you mean! As I become more clear-headed, I can see what's going to come next in my writing more clearly. Everything has become more straightforward. There is little second-guessing, and a lot more logic. The roads to my brain are no longer blocked."

"Yes!" she exclaimed, happy that I came to the same conclusion. "It's a different kind of good writing."

We talked about art and artists and what makes someone more of an artist than another. Is a "true artist" someone who needs the outlet of art in order to feel more "like him/herself"? Or is a "true artist" someone who just happens to create work which affects/effects others?

Some people, after suffering from strokes or other incidents of brain damage, begin to write and draw and paint and create at an alarming and amazing rate; their art is gorgeous and profoud. But are they "true artists", or have they become "true artists" via their ailment, or were they never "true artists" at all?

As I'm continuing my latest short story collection and noticing myself changing, and my writing style evolving, I am faced with the fact that different things make up who I am.

I am no longer the girl who needed her thoughts provoked or her muse tickled by some dark pathos. Now, the biggest problem I have when writing is the inevitable futile fishing for the right word.

My writing doesn't necessarily have the same kind of urgency; while writing I've lost the feeling that I'm sharing something sacred and real which everyone must understand and relate to. Now, everything I write is truly for me, and I know that if a piece provokes a sense or emotion in me, that it has fulfilled its purpose.

I think, after many years of trying to decipher some misplaced intention to be an artist, somehow I molded myself into the role. It isn't merely a skin that I wear and shed as if I'm some sloughing snake. It's who I am through and through, and I know that the things I come up with are art. They're indicative of me - the person I am now - and that's what they're supposed to be. Anything else would be a pale imitation of a former self, and that isn't real. That isn't my kind of art.

Even now, after I was distracted by the sound of the TV, I am cognizant of the fact that I have lost my train of thought, for which my former self would have severely criticized herself. But this - this - this writing, spewing out of my thoughts, rambling, craziness, is what's happening, and somehow that makes it good. The true translation from physical action to the written word is what makes it art. It's something that I would never have been able to do before - I would be kicking myself in the ass to retrieve a train of thought that's long departed the station. But thoughts are not stationary and another one comes up next, and the ability to project happenings into minds is not monopolized by any single thought.

Writing is a process, and different writers employ different techniques, skills, focuses. I am simply writing in a different way. And it doesn't make it any less good or any less me. It doesn't make me any less of an artist - just a different one.