Dispatches from Madness: Notes From a Real-Life “Tortured Artist”

Being a "tortured artist" type is fucking exhausting. Worse yet is even thinking of myself as being either "tortured" or "an artist," because I'm not getting poked at with sticks or being flayed with razors, nor do I subscribe to the notion that squishing the stuff I make into a (figurative) box of academic legitimacy in any way validates anything that I do. No. Fuck that. Torture is meaningless. Art is meaningless. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone.

See, all that right there, that's what "tortures" me. There is constant white noise happening all the fucking time, and then there's equally loud response to the white noise, coming from all different directions, and to make it all worse, there are these expectations—either real or imagined—to somehow weigh in on the white noise response to the original white noise, thus generating further white noise, and holy fuck, just please

shut

up.

My brain. I can't catch a break. I got diagnosed with ADHD at thirty, and it made my entire life up to that point make so much more sense, and it was also extremely frustrating to finally know this about myself, because maybe I could have gone those past thirty years without all that undiagnosed frustration. 

Then again, after receiving my diagnosis, it didn't exactly change anything. All it really does for me is allow me to point to my own brain and go, "Oh, that's why I do/can't do [X, Y, Z]," and then nothing changes, and I go about the rest of my life frustrated with myself.

Because, like, all I want to do is sit in my room and make stuff. But making stuff requires energy, it requires a certain amount of effort, and when I spend so much time and energy trying to filter out the aforementioned white noise coming from all directions, from all avenues of life, it just locks me place, and I can't do anything.

And it's not that I "feel" like I can't do anything, no, I literally can't do anything. My brain is overloaded trying to process all the media, all the social media, all the advertising that funds all the media, all the emails, all the letters, all the packages, all the invoices, all the phone calls, all the responsibilities, all the commitments, all the family, all the friends, all the news, all the issues, all the unimportant issues, all the celebrity gossip, all the new music releases, all the new movies, all the new video games, all the new gadgets, all the new restaurants, all the closed restaurants, all the gas mileage in my car, all the gas it needs to function, all the chores, all the vitamins I need to take, all the taxes, all the 

and then next thing I know, it's six p.m. and I forgot to eat.

I had one cup of coffee and maybe a banana at, like, eleven a.m., but that's it. Holy shit, I'm starving, and I haven't done a shred of writing today. I haven't drawn a single line. I stared at this screen for hours doing nothing, while my brain was working at breakneck pace doing everything, and now I'm exhausted, and my body needs fuel, but I don't have the energy to stand at the cooker with a wooden spoon and a pot, so fuckit, I think there's still some crackers left the cupboard, that'll have to do.

Oh hell yeah, and there's cheese, I fucking love me some cheese. 

So I bring my snack dinner back to the computer, I start to write whatever the fuck this is, and I think about how I can't wait for the day to end so I can get back to playing video games, even though I didn't do shit but sit and think all goddamn day long. Ok sure, I did some chores here and there, and hey, I think I even brushed my teeth for once, but functionally, like, externally, I did nothing but sit and stare.

And so, out of pure frustration and built-up energy, I open my …

(not Word Document, I'm writing this in Google Docs. What the fuck is this thing called, then, if it's not a Microsoft product? My "blank, cloud-saved word processor file"? That takes too long. But I'm not using Microsoft Word, so it's not a Word Document, so then what the fuck is it?

Oh, wait, I got it)

… I open my virtual journal thing and start pouring all these "notes" out of my head by channeling it all through my fingers and clacking away at the keyboard like a madman.

Seriously, if you were a fly on the wall, you'd think I was an absolute psychopath, a true maniac, the way I bounce my head and sway and look around the room and not even at the screen while my fingers move at such a pace that it's as if they're moving on their own, like I'm being controlled by some alien brain parasite that's taken control of my body, I mean seriously, at some points I look like a white Ray Charles, but like, without sunglasses, and I'm at a computer keyboard, not a piano, and I'm not producing anything more audible than the clacking of input keys to conduct an otherwise entirely silent sympony of thought and idea and imagination onto this blank virtual page that all sounds really, really good in my head, but probably reads like pure nonsense to you; dispatches from the very heart of madness itself.

Or, head, I guess.

And then, after the energy starts to wane, and I've cranked out almost 1000 words in the span of, I dunno, fifteen? twenty minutes? I start to relax, I feel like all is right with the world, and I can actually do this whole life thing, I can do this whole "making stuff" thing that I pretend to enjoy but secretly (well, I guess, not-so-secretly) loathe, and I swear to god if I get distracted before I wrap up this thought I am going to lose my fucking mind and I don't know if I can bear it and I will be miserable and smelly (because I won't shower) and hungry (because I won't eat) and lethargic (because I'll spend all day in bed) every single day for days if not weeks or even months on end. 

This whole fucking thing, if one part of it, one tiny bit, even goes slightly off-course, if I make a mistake anywhere along the way, that's it. Life officially ruined. 

Again.

And so I mope, and I mill about, and watch too much garbage on YouTube, and scroll too much on Instagram, and don't even get me the fuck started on TikTok, which I downloaded once and was instantly overwhelmed and am never using ever, ever again.

And I take a break. And I listen to the stillness. 

I hear birds outside. I slow my typing. 

The sun is coming down over the mountain. The balcony is cast in a very soft chiaroscuro lighting (the spelling for which I had to confirm with Google which threw me off balance for just a moment, but not so much that I lost focus completely). The clouds … I dunno, they're clouds, like all clouds are clouds, but they're nice all the same.

The moment of relaxation is sudden and profound. I blink away the lights in my eyes made from staring at the reflective surface of a nimbus (at least, I think it was a nimbus) cloud and look back at the virtual page and breathe, not realizing I'd been holding my breath this whole time. 

My shoulders slacken, my jaw loosens, my fingers feel less like I'm attacking the keyboard and more like they're flowing. The thoughts aren't a waterfall anymore, they've slowed to a stream, which will slow to a trickle, then to a few drips, and then they'll stop.

And then, for at least today, I'm done.

Maybe it'll be easier tomorrow. Maybe it'll be exactly the same as today. It's impossible to tell. All I really know is this shit's tiring as fuck.

Post-Script
You ever see a boxer after they've won a fight? They're all sweaty and hunched over and got that dead look in their eye because they just spent the last twenty minutes getting wacked in the head by another dude who didn't wack nearly as hard as they did?

That's how I feel. Every single time.

Making stuff is hard.

Post-Post-Script

Look, "art" and "artist" are great shorthands for "making stuff," and that's probably how I'll use those terms if I ever do moving forward, but like, can we just agree that confining stuff that is made to galleries and museums and whatever else is really fucking dumb? And also it's objectively cringe to squeal about "my art" or "your art" or "appreciating art" when we could all just shut the fuck up and look at the nice thing that someone made and move on with our day? Please?