Why Am I Talking?

I’ve lived through insanity. Now, I serve by holding space as others’ worldviews crumble.

I’ve spewed too much; I can never shut it up. I thought you should be warned.

Every Man has a Molly by Say Anything

I desperately chug a Pabst. My eyes water as much from terror as from cold, tingling carbonation. The doorbell to my apartment continues to buzz aggressively and I know with absolute certainty I’ll be murdered when that person finds a way inside. I finish the beer and gasp for breath, figuring I’d rather be inebriated when meeting my maker.

Was any of it real? Did the man who shook my hand months earlier with that trippy thumb wiggle that made me dizzy and disoriented… did he really hypnotize me? Was I ever actually stalked? Was I watched?

Was any of it real? 

It was real to me.

I considered my writing responsible for this perceived persecution throughout much of my twenties. I associated the Big Anxiety I felt following the thrill of Big Planning—the inflated perception of my writing’s value—with paranoid narratives about vague, malicious agencies who wanted to suppress a voice like mine. 

Still, I keep compulsively finding ways to write.

In work emails or text conversations with my parents, I obsess over rattling off exactly what I aim to. I’ve been told it’s showy, that it’s condescending, but I can’t stop. It’s like I had a little faculty with language—a little innate talent that got some praise early on—and then I felt compelled to build an identity around being a “person who is good with words.”

“Why Am I Talking,” I ask myself. Is it just a vestigial identity I’ve clung to, or do I have something to say? 

In some ways, I’m a vessel for the outsider voice I earned getting pushed to chug that Pabst a dozen years ago. The reverberating paranoia that presses through time to breaks like turbulent waves against my stability: I’ve finally earned a vantage point from which I can accept it. But it wasn’t easy.

Image generated using AI on the Creekmason Initiates Discord

I tried everything to stop. Like erasing my first half-finished manuscript.

The story I was working on when I lost my mind was about the Creekmasons, the fictitious upstart kayfabe illuminati organization after which this Content Collective gets its name. I was writing it while Prop 19 was passing through the California legislative branch, which would have made that state the first with legal recreational cannabis. 

Despite my decade of weed sobriety, the Creekmason logo still has a pot leaf and a pipe in it to memorialize a time when the group only existed on paper as a diverse band of rebels working together on getting weed legalized and making a profit off it.

As I descended into the madness of a psychedelic-fueled Bipolar diagnosis—and ascended to ever greater delusions of grandeur—the scope of my ambition for the story grew from “publishable” to “revolutionary.” The heights of ambition had tag-along heights of anxiety corresponding directly in scope and my sense of persecution evolved from social anxiety to a shitty landlord to street gangs to the CIA to The Freemasons to the Illuminati. 

So yes, I deleted my manuscript and notes for the project. I swore to never write again. To be a Good Boy.

But I couldn’t keep myself away from words.

I tried everything. Like being an alcoholic. 

The next period of my life was dark.

For years, I felt that if I was getting too drunk and subsequently too hungover to develop a consistent writing practice, my life would be safe. The alcohol allowed me to relax my expectations of myself. 

It brought relief. 

Even if I couldn’t shake the burning urge to write, I found ways to numb it out. 

Still, the benders never lasted forever. I’d find myself capturing scraps of dialogue at work or crafting sonnets on the nights I didn’t have enough money to buy a buzz. 

Outwardly, I wanted to stop. To just live a normal, safe, long life. Secretly, I never really gave it up.

I tried never shipping. 

If only I knew I was writing maybe I’d be safe.  I mean only me; I wrote with pen and paper in a notebook that I always kept on my person or in my car for years.

Finally, with about 10 pages left in it, I lost the notebook while I was either on-the-way-to or inside Target one day and had a panic attack so severe I had to call off work in the evening. The fact is that my then-toddler probably threw it out the window of our car, but I walked the whole route from our house to Target with her in the stroller and didn’t find it. 

So I felt like the “target” was me. 

I told myself the story that my notebook was stolen from my car while I was shopping. My writing was still too dangerous to the powers that be, and so those powers were reaching dangerously into my life. 

I told myself I really had to quit this time.

Instead, I tried being a poet. 

If my fiction was too dangerous to the status quo—a thought that makes me cringe with its obviously delusional grandiosity now—then maybe I could write slam poetry that was worth a damn. 

I’d write my poems and then take long walks reciting them under my breath. When I was living in The City, I’d do it through dangerous neighborhoods after the bars closed, clenching and unclenching my fists the whole trip so I’d look too crazy to be worth fucking with. The way a bear will run away from a house cat. Any shadowy secret society, any predator who wanted to, could wreck me. Like an angry cat, though, I might get a scratch or two in and I thought the prospect of that sting was enough to keep me left alone.

I recited poems staggering home drunkenly from the bar, sometimes directly into my phone’s mic, as if testing fate. As if pushing the boundaries of my “Watchers,” as I often called them, to see if I could get away with being a Creative.

Finally, oppressed with shitfaced depression and certain I’d never achieve anything with words, I shouted into my phone on one of these walks home through dimly lamplit suburbia. 

Like Arnold to the Predator, I shouted, “Kill me, now!”

I tried to stop. Until the Global Pandemic.

I wrote the Journaling in Verse trilogy a poem a day beginning when I first started to worry about COVID, a few days after the 100th case in the US. It became the first writing I ever sold, and all I had to do to feel confident enough to ship was confront my mortality at the same time the entire world was doing it. Simple.

I was going to die anyway, I figured. 

It didn’t matter what a Good Boy I had been for the last 10 years; now the whole world was catching up to the paranoia I’d been captured by. Conspiracy between government and corporations; criticisms of capitalist corruption; a general wariness of power. All that I’d absorbed from sketchy websites with deranged ranting spluttered into a rambling single paragraph on a black background… there are mainstream people and outlets who now espouse those same theories. 

In the case of almost every rabbit hole I fell down, there are now documents that corroborate my paranoid conclusions.

It’s like the world is catching up to my psychosis.

I started to recognize a pattern around this poetic catharsis about a hundred days in, just before I began to publish my poems on social media and subsequently on Amazon.

WAIT: Why Am I Talking?

I’d doom-scroll for hours or days, slurping back trauma, grief, tragedy and terror until I was drunk on it. Plastered enough to break down in despairing sobs. 

Then I’d retreat. 

I’d figure out how to metabolize it into a poem. 

Through the act of pinning down my fears and paranoias with rhyme, metaphor and meter, I’d feel like the master of them. When it came to diction, if not the real world, I had the power.

The questions inspired by Why Am I Talking are worthwhile:

• Does the world need another voice like mine?
• Who else is talking like me?
• What intentions or psychosocial energies am I speaking from? 
• What fuels my thinking, writing and sharing?

I wrote this piece to answer them. 

What fuels my thinking, writing and sharing? Obsession. An inability to stop expressing myself, even when I believed it might cost me my life. Compulsion. I write because I identify as a writer through some complex cocktail of external validation and self-definition that swirl around and reinforce one another. I’m addicted to words.

My psychosocial energies? The spiritual alchemy of chaos, paranoia, terror, trauma and grief. Finding the light that casts those shadows and celebrating it. What was at the root of that decade of trauma summarized above? What ideas did I perceive to be too dangerous for the status quo? What did the original fictitious Creekmasons—those hard-partying stoner activists—stand for? Peace. Love. Unity. Respect. You might be familiar.

Who else shares these views? I started the Creekmasons Content Collective to find out. Join the discord; introduce yourself; help me cultivate a feed of media that promotes the community’s resilience, hope, mental health and growth.

Join Discord!

Does the world need me? Fuck. This I don’t know. Isn’t the implication that this essay might have any form of broad appeal another foray into delusional grandeur? If I have a service, it might be acting as a doula for transitions from default reality to the stranger lands of spiritual attainment, revolutionary societal criticism, and psychological inquiry and healing. 

But who knows?

I’ll say this: at least my story is finally shifting away from being so big and scary and shameful that it seems necessary to repress it.

We’re meaning making creatures in a society that insists sanity means believing the world is dead, orderless chaos. We are taught to repress our “infantile” yearning for story, so it pops up in strange, uninvited and potentially harmful ways.

What happens when we damn a part of ourselves? We project it onto Others. We express it unhealthily. Ineffectively. The explosion of conspiracy thinking going on in society right now, could it be the outcome of a repressed and stigmatized tendency toward psychosis? 

The flavor I’m prone to doesn’t have to be a totalizing story; I can accept that it feels true, but only insofar as all myths are true. 

And that liminality—that not-quite-commitment to credulity—is why I think I have something to say. 

A dozen years ago, I shattered. The fringes were all that was left to me. But from the fringes I see the play of societal thesis and antithesis and I’m far enough away to forge a synthesis. It seems obvious that what we need right now is to come together. Translating ideas from one side of the political or spiritual or cultural spectrum to the other is maybe not the worst addiction. 

I lived through the suck. Now I feel competent at holding space for people as they confront the dismantling of their worldview. 

In the end though, maybe “the world” doesn’t need my writing. There might still be at least one person out there experiencing the dissolution of their reality and feeling isolated. Maybe seeing their experience represented in media will help. Maybe they’ll read these words, published like plucky graffiti on the walls of the interwebs, and they’ll feel a little less alone.

Maybe that person is me.