Bruce’s Online Journal

“I write because I don’t know what I think, until I read what I say.” — Flannery O'Connor

Week of May 28, 2001

May 28

I’m beginning to learn more about how my creativity works. I’m learning this through the discovery of what doesn’t work.

I’ve always known that I can’t be creative on command. In fact, being commanded to do something creative effectively turns off that part of my head. My mind goes completely blank and my face takes on an expression like that of a fish trying to breathe out of water. I can almost feel gills sprout from the sides of my neck. This is why I don’t do well in “brainstorming” sessions.

Second, I’ve always had what I call second-hand creativity. Give me blank sheet of paper and about all I can do with it is make a paper airplane. I can do even less with a blank document in Word.

I’ve always enjoyed music but I can’t play and could never come up with an original melody or lyrics. I thought I’d found nirvana when somebody set me behind two turntables in a bar and said, “Just keep the dance floor full.” It let me do with music what I’d always wanted to do -- take it apart and put if back together in new and interesting ways. A third turntable and a couple of tape decks let me take things to a whole new level. Then when they came out with variable-speed turntables, well that was pure heaven.

In any event, I need something to start the process, a seed planted, and then some time alone. Given that, I can come up with just about anything.

I also need constraint of some sort. I work best within boundaries like solving specific problems with budget constraints, limits on time and material, that sort of thing. Artificial boundaries, like those set in creative exercises, kill the entire process.

Back in the day, one of my biggest creative outlets was writing database code. A seed was planted, there was a problem to solve, there were boundaries and I worked alone. The creative process is what drove me in those days, although it appeared to others that I was simply a hard worker.

Working with code lately on Project A and learning XHTML and CSS has taken me back to those happy days. Doing it sober has been a new, enlightening and infinitely more satisfying experience. It’s also helped me to see one of the other things that disrupt my creative processes. Endpoints.

I’m not referring to deadlines. Properly set deadlines, ones that aren’t arbitrary and are reasonable as opposed to “I need it yesterday” form part of the constraint that lets things flow. What I’ve discovered is that when I can work on something only until a certain time, then I have to do something else, that sort of endpoint, the whole process breaks down.

That’s been the major difficulty in writing lately. Subconsciously, I’ve shifted things, like working on Project A, to those open ended times when I can stop at either the natural conclusion of that part of the project or whenever I run out of steam.

My writing time, another creative process, has been moved around to fit into times when there’s something in my schedule that limits the time I can spend on it. It works like an artificial boundary that kills the entire process.

I discovered all this the other night when, after getting home from a meeting, I knew the juices were flowing, I jumped right on the PC and the next thing I knew, it was 3:30 the following morning. Of course that’s not the best of all possible solutions to the problem. I was cranky and felt all out of sorts for a day and a half afterwards.

It’s all something I have to take into account as I make the transition from group to the real world. I need to somehow balance the schedule of work and meetings to give myself ample open-ended time to write and work on the learning/coding/redesign project.


Reader and fellow journaler, Maddie, sent a note the other day asking in part, “Will post-graduation be a high-risk time or do you have enough exciting things going on to get through the transition?” That simple question sparked an e-novel reply.

Part of me has been chomping at the bit to get back into the real world. Part of me has wanted to stay in group and hide from the real world. Much larger than either of those parts is the part of me that wants to proceed cautiously. But I’ve also recognized that part of what made me choose this time is my inner drama queen.

The day I picked to graduate is the day after You Know Who’s (YKW) birthday. It’s only a few days before mine. There are going to be all sorts of feelings around that. It’s also the day before a friend who has been a tremendous support leaves for a ten-day business conference. There’s also the issue I shared with Backroads members a few days ago.

Add to this the stress induced by the job-search process and the “anniversary anxiety” other AA members have warned me about. I can already feel some of that. In many ways I couldn’t have picked a worse time to transition back into the real world.

It’s the job component that frightens me the most. First, I can’t say for sure how much my recent poverty has contributed to my abstinence. It’s very difficult to yield to a craving when you don’t have the money to acquire the drug. Know that I can’t buy it has helped me through some of those times.

Having a job means having regular infusions of cash. For a good long time getting a check meant it was time to get high. Looking back, it’s amazing how easily got through the times in between weekly cash infusions. Whether or not I had cravings, whether or not emotional issues were bothering me, whether or not YKW was around to influence me, cash meant getting high.

I worry about how I’ll handle the combination of cash, craving and a case of the “fuck its”. I’ve learned how to get past the latter two, even in combination, in the absence of the first. Naturally I think that I’ve gotten better enough to deal with it. I wonder if this confidence comes from self-delusion.

Self-delusion is a hallmark of an addict. I had almost 30 years to practice it. I’ve had less than one to learn how to see past it.

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