“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury
At this exact moment in time, something rare is happening with me. I am not stressed out. I am not too terribly worried or concerned, be it with work or money or my writing or anything thing else. I realize that this might be the fact that I have a mug of good coffee and sunshine out my window. It’s payday and I’m a little ahead for the month in my finances and I have met my view goal on this blog for May (thanks to all of you readers!). I have a relaxing day off stretched out ahead of me and so I am having a rare moment of peace and it’s quite pleasant.
Probably by the time noon rolls around, I’ll start getting about to taking care of some errands and trying to fix my clusterfuck of a schedule next weekend, and so the stress is likely to return. Weekends at work are always stressful by default and I’ll have to return to that soon, and I know that, when I do, I will take a second and remind myself of this quote and how true it is that writing can be such a great escape from the world trying to destroy you.
My outlook on the world is no where near as disgusted or disappointed as it probably could be; I believe in living a simple life, which in turn means your concerns tend to be simple as well, but I do know that even with my petty concerns, my writing gets me through it. I wish I could get as drunk on writing as some authors seem capable; to just plunge yourself in as one would toward the bottom of a bottle, where the writing is the sole motivation, the drive of the pen is the only thing, and you give yourself over to the chaos of the words on the page and manage to brush aside the chaos of the world outside, even if only for a little bit. When you’re writing, there’s a semblance of control: this is a world you are creating and, for the most part, you move the pawns, you push the plot, you decide what happens. You definitely don’t have that kind of control in the real world.
I think that’s something a writer (and often the reader as well) has that very few people can have the advantage of: no matter what happens in the world, we can always fall back on the writing. Whether to escape from it, to deal with it, to address it head on and try to open some eyes, we have that escape. It’s both a blessing and a curse; we allow ourselves to get away into our own worlds sometimes, but sometimes, we have a habit of staying too much inside of them, like a drunk falls too much into the illusion of escape with his habit.
L.S. Engler 