What follows is [a very condensed version of] a piece of writing that helped me realize some personally very important things, which means it probably won’t mean much of anything to you, and that’s why I only put a brief part of it below.
(I am debating whether to put a link up to the full 3,600 word thing, in which I go into a lot more depth about what this thing is, my experience with it, and what to do about it now that I realize that this is a “thing,” but it’s pretty personal and not the type of thing that has mass appeal. If you’re desperate to see it, send me an email.)
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For a while I’ve had this creeping suspicion that there is something about me that is kind of weird, something that makes regular conversations hard, something that makes it disturbingly easy for me to be alone. Some “condition.”
Obviously nothing is fundamentally different about me, but I suspect that the thing that most separates me from the average bear can be described as a two-parter: (1) To an unusual degree, I live in my head, absorbed in conscious thoughts, and (2) I am disturbingly comfortable being alone with those thoughts. In my default state – when I’m not tired, pissy, or depressed – my mind is something like an unrelenting stream of questions and responses. Why did that person do what they just did? Why this way instead of that way? What does it mean? What makes this interesting? Why am I asking these questions? Etc. etc.
Here is how I’ll hammer my weirdness home: I sincerely believe that if you locked me in an empty room with no windows, no sounds, no reading material, and no stimuli whatsoever other than a keyboard, I think I could keep myself happy as a duck for 7-10 hours, or until I desperately needed to pee or eat. If you throw in the essentials (a serviceable toilet, food, a shower, something to sleep on) plus some tunes and a dog, I think I could stay reasonably happy in there until my muscles started to atrophy. In other words, I don’t need much other than something to write with – something to allow my conscious thoughts out – to keep me lastingly amused. I suspect that makes me unusual, and also kind of fucked up.
This is something that has bothered me for a long time. I couldn’t help shake the feeling that my mind is considerably more active than average, and that that is causing me some problems, but how do you talk about that without sounding like a condescending dick? “Doctor, I’m afraid my mental life might be richer than other people’s.” Thinking of it as a disorder – something that I can legitimately claim makes me in some ways fucked up – is incredibly freeing.
Look, I’m not trying to get this added to the DSM-5, I’m just saying that I can now defend that there is a point beyond which an active mind is, in fact, fucked up.
I think a lot of professional writers probably have the same “condition.” In fact, this is a topic DFW indirectly grappled with a lot. Here is Colin Marshall in a post called “The Protagonist” identifying what he thinks of as the question of DFW’s writing:
Can we possibly act, always and everywhere, on the assumption that all the other people around us possess fully realized inner lives too? Can we ever consistently see them, in all their consciousness, as more than bit players in the grand drama starring us?
Here is a quote from DFW himself:
I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.
I now understand why that blog post has nagged me more than any blog post has ever nagged me. DFW was wrong! His conscious mind *was* more active than the average conscious mind. That seems pretty obvious, but I was reluctant to admit it for the same reason that DFW was: he mistook his perception of having a “more complicated and acutely perceived inner life” to be synonymous with being a narcissistic dickhead. For him, it was an ego issue to be quelled.
I feel like there is sufficient evidence to say with some authority that DFW did in fact have a more active mental life than average. It wasn’t just that he was writing these monster books and articles while all the common folk ruminated quietly about the same questions to themselves. It seems pretty clear given the substance of his writing that he did a lot more questioning than the average person, and even a lot more questioning than people like me who question a lot.
What has made this troubling for DFW (and Colin) and me, I suspect, is that (1) we’ve assumed (thanks to cultural narratives) that an active mental life – synonymous with terms like curiosity and awareness – is inherently “good,” and the more the better, and (2) we can’t know what it’s like in other people’s minds, so we couldn’t voice – even internally – our suspicions without feeling like pompous dickheads.
But if we drop the assumption that an active mind is good, then we can say that, yes, we probably are unusual, and that doesn’t make us any better. It just means that we have something that makes us kind of fucked up, something that, like most (all?) mental disorders, comes with both some precious advantages and some pretty severe disadvantages.
