Stand Up Eight

When I left the suburbs of Raleigh for downtown Montreal, I was filled with a sense of boundless opportunity. I would soon be free of the constraints of high school drama (to be replaced with a more potent variety) and the teenagers with whom I had spent the past four years tirelessly working and slacking to get into college. I was nervous, not knowing anyone in Canada, and thrilled, as I knew no one in Canada. I had an opportunity my friends lacked in that I could totally reinvent myself without a constant reminder of the person I used to be walking around in the form of my fellow students. I was the only one of my friends to leave the state, and one of three from a class of over 600 to leave the country. I didn't feel that the world was my oyster, more that it was an endless library with each aisle and tome containing new people and experiences which would have a significant impact on my life to come.

As is so often the case, I found my theory to be correct; yet the impacts of the people and experiences I was to encounter spanned the gamut from wonderful to terrifying. I made friends from every walk of life, countries whose capitals I did not know (which doesn't happen often), and who spoke more languages than could be counted on one hand. It was this time in my life, this time being the incredibly recent past of last semester, that I collided with my largely inelastic limits on alcohol consumption and self motivation.

I started my freshman year of college under the mistaken impression that I was my sister. My sister, who I love dearly, likes to have a good time. She's incredibly intelligent and studious, but when she goes out for the night you know it's a party. As I also like to indulge from time to time, I figured that our mutual tendency to be people about town fell in line with our corresponding interests in French and political science. Thus, I figured my college experience would be similar to her's. Party every weekend, leave at midnight, come back at four, and do it all over again the next day. My liver did not take kindly to this idea, and made it quite clear by forcing me to my knees before the porcelain altar on more than one occasion. I soon discovered the joys of a night in, although I became burdened with guilt that I was spurring the opportunities the city afforded me, opportunities that were prime factors in my decision to hop the border.

As the pressure mounted from my course load and I began to drift apart from people on my floor (a matter of differing interests more than confrontation), I soon felt the sinister tendrils of anxiety curling around my psyche. When I was driven to a panic attack during frosh week due to excessive drinking, I assumed it was an isolated incident. However I became doubtful that this was the case as I became increasingly anxious as the term progressed.

It started out with abstaining from weekend outings with the floor. I opted to stay in, preferring not to tempt fate and revisit the day's meals. Having only experienced these flutters of panic in the isolation of my own room, I soon began to associate my room with heightened anxiety. As you can imagine, this made attempting to fall asleep somewhat of a chore to say the least. By mid October I was completely off alcohol, fearing it's panic inducing effects, and my appetite had waned to the point where my daily caloric intake came from a cup of coffee and a croissant.

The week before I was scheduled to see my sister and our mutual friends in Boston was without a doubt the most grueling of my life. By this point severe anxiety was a constant companion, driving me to hyperventilation every waking moment and abolishing my appetite and sense of thirst. I ate nothing and forced myself to drink water, an act that was met with intense waves of nausea which inspired more terror at the prospect of throwing up (an irrational fear to be sure). I did anything I thought would help reduce the level of anxiety that had my life in a death grip, but nothing worked. Depression set in not long after, and I became overcome with sadness and fear. The upside to this was that crying superseded the panic, and every night of that week I would go to my room and pray for a thought tragic enough to force me to tears. In sorrow, anxiety could not touch me, and I found respite in sobbing into my pillow. It got to the point where I fantasized about death because of the lack of anxiety a corpse experiences six feet under (to be clear, I wasn't suicidal, I just thought about death in the philosophical context of the absence of feeling and emotion).

This may seem like an extreme reaction to anxiety, but for those of you unfamiliar with the feelings of a panic attack, allow me to give you a crash course. First, you feel a flutter in your stomach, which I describe as the evil twin of the adrenaline rush one gets on a roller coaster. This is followed by nausea and a loss of control over one's breath. The only thought running through your head is why do I feel this way? You are utterly terrified of this emotion and anything that could amplify it. In short, you feel as if you're going to die. This was my life. I spent hours walking around the neighborhood around my dorm in hopes that the cold would freeze the panic out of me. The one time I forced myself to eat a salad, I became nauseous and subsequently refused to use that particular salad dressing even after my appetite began to return. I moved my furniture in hopes that it would break the association I had between feelings of panic and my dorm room. None of this was effective.

Figuring I had nothing to lose in leaving the country for a weekend, I went ahead with my trip as scheduled. I decided that seeing my sister and friends would be a positive change in my life that could just break the cycle of panic that had engulfed me for the past several weeks. My mini vacation helped significantly, and while I was by no means back to normal I felt almost reborn. I spent my first week back reveling in my ability to eat and not going into fits of terror at the drop of a hat. I decided that the true test of my return to normalcy would be going out Halloween weekend. If I could make a successful trip out with friends and not spiral into a panic, I knew I'd be on the road to recovery. I failed in my endeavor, and a subsequent trip to my favorite club solidified my aversion to both drinking and going out.

While greatly diminished, my anxiety was by no means cured. As I only felt the feelings of panic at night, I soon refused to leave the dorm after dark. I could not stand to talk, hear, or read about alcohol or the act of vomiting, and when I came across these subjects in books I became uncomfortable and pushed to the edge of anxiousness. I found that I could stay in my room only if I had all the lights on and was particularly positioned on my bed. I soon came to the conclusion that the only cure for my condition was the impending month long break I would have without the stress of classes in a familiar setting surrounded by the people I love.

A month at home was precisely what I needed. I spent every day watching TV from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, and I loved every single minute of it. I never got bored, and I felt that rather than wasting my time I was detoxing and healing the deep mental wounds of the past two months. After discovering that I had lost 20 pounds out of stress (an unhealthy occurrence in someone who's 6' 4" and only weighed 160 pounds to begin with) , I dedicated myself to restoring my appetite and original body weight. The day before I left to return to Montreal, I felt renewed.

Since my return from winter break, I have slowly undergone the arduous process of mentally desensitizing myself to the triggers I had developed the previous semester. I began to gradually force myself out after dark, and I even went out my first weekend back. I had gone from contemplating death to returning to my former life of occasional partying. While I'm still not completely back to normal, I take solace in the Japanese proverb that says, "Fall seven times, stand up eight." I am in the process of picking myself up from my seventh fall, and I'm too smart and too dedicated to let anything keep me from standing at full height, ready to wander the shelves of this library of a world and delve into its endless volumes of people and all that comes with them. 

I am seriously concerned about my recent lack of motivation in the field of creative writing. Rarely do I find myself at a loss for words, and when I am faced with a predicament such as this I can't help but wonder what existential force is powerful enough to stay my hand at the keyboard. It's not that I believe my thought process to be so overwhelmingly ingenious that it is immune to obstacles of boredom. On the contrary, someone who always has something to say is rarely a person worth listening to. It's simply that I'm always thinking, deluding myself into believing that my opinions and observations are worthy of praise. The only thing in which I truly take pride is not my powers of perception but my ability to convey what I see and think in a manner that is eloquent, spell binding and at times humorous. In short, I seek to captivate people's interest in what would be in the hands of a lesser writer a truly mundane subject.

Thus I'm terribly worried that my stymied creative flow is foreshadowing a devolution in my intellectual prowess. By all accounts I am not an attractive man, I am not physically fit in the slightest and I have the stage presence of a four year old. Ergo, I rely on what I perceive to be my one true talent, writing. Am I intelligent? I would say yes, but my grasp of world affairs, the French language and the American political system is something that could easily be taught to someone with a greater work ethic and less acidic tongue than myself. I chalk this up to constantly being surrounded by people far more motivated, dedicated and linguistically well versed than I, and consequently I feel greatly disheartened living down the hall from a girl who speaks three languages and is the founder of a multi-national charity.

Where do I turn for inspiration? Should I address the shimmering coat of snow that blankets the uneven field on campus, the dangerously poised frozen stalactites keeping guard at the windows of every house? Of course not, such imagery would be hideously cliche. I am truly at a loss. There are a million things on which I would love to give my opinion, but I have neither the credibility nor following to merit a detailed explanation as to why a combination of Keynesian economic theory and tax increases are the cure to the current fiscal crisis facing the United States. Even among the things we pass; time, gas, and judgment, I have found no witty critique blossoming in my temporal lobe.

What does a writer do to fill his empty mind? Oscar Wilde liked absinthe, Tom Wolfe his white suits. What I need is a defining characteristic that generates both recognition and mystique. I'm much more partial to bourbon, and a student budget is not conducive to purchasing suits. An ideal solution would be a complete change of venue, a trip to a foreign yet developed locale such as Barcelona or Lyon. I could make broad generalizations in concise paragraphs about cultures enriched by millenia of history, and given the widespread ignorance of young people they would hang on my every word. Montreal is nice, but it lacks that prestige that comes with flying transatlantic.

Thus, my course of action is clear. Finding the means to achieve the ends is another matter entirely, but practitioners of the arts are not to be burdened with such trifles as logic or reality. People who apply themselves to the physical and mathematical sciences are bound by the constraints of facts, and facts are so unimaginative. They may be interesting conversation pieces, or lead to breakthroughs in medicine and feats of engineering, but why bother to take the time to try and find them? Research is like an elaborate game of hide and seek, where the course is set with stringent guidelines. Writing is a process of creation where gravity doesn't matter, significant digits don't count and lobsters may have the power of judicial review.

I will concede that imagination is fueled by our perceptions of the tangible universe. It is the spark that ignites the creative flame, but consider this passage from T.S Eliot's The Wasteland.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

 

Here we see lilacs, vivid shoots of color, new life and aesthetic pleasure arise from the unresponsive, lifeless expanse of dead earth, combining with man's most important thought processes. Lilacs are the great canons of literature, formed from a body that holds no whimsical content, facts. While facts can inspire in their own right by driving people to action, it is the human psyche that is the true source of creativity in this world.