I saw my therapist this week after a couple of months away. When she asked how I was doing, I launched into a blistering, tornado-like account of all John and I have encountered since January. I usually offer a narrative that is somewhat measured and grounded — a tidy description of whatever I hope to address. But this week, I was all over the place. I gave myself permission to be a mess.
Some of the recent chaos in our lives has been self-inflicted, choices John and I have made to propel ourselves forward along life’s path, and some of it has been unexpected, like a summer storm that appears with no warning at all. The unforeseen parts included both very good opportunities and very difficult family matters, but we couldn’t have seen any of them coming. As a result, we found ourselves managing an overwhelming number of things at once.
When my disjointed story came to an end, I told my therapist, “I’d forgotten what it’s like to deal with this much stress! I’ve been feeling a little nuts.”
My therapist is good at her job, so it didn’t take her long to cut to the heart of the matter. She had me imagine myself as an 87-year-old woman on a porch, sitting with John, reflecting on our past. She asked if looking back on a life that did not include the changes we’re making this spring would cause regret. The answer, welling from my gut, was immediately yes.
As she helped me make sense of this period, my therapist reminded me that my baseline programming is to feel guilty when I have a need. She insisted that even when my needs introduce stress for myself or others, I should not deny them or do things like call myself insane. She reminded me that I’ve been talking about needing geographical and cultural expansion for years. Over a decade, John would add.
“Feeling a little nuts,” my therapist said, “is just part of taking a risk or making a change. It comes along with doing something that is important to you.”
Some tiny swirling part of me went still when she said that. My brain froze and my thinking changed direction. I’ve been saying I feel nuts, assuming being nuts is a bad thing. My therapist’s implication was that feeling nuts, in this case, is nothing to worry about. It’s simply a side effect of taking bold but necessary risk.
This realization has been playing in my head all week. Maybe being nuts isn’t so bad after all. It might even be something to celebrate. Hey — good news — I’m nuts!
What about all the artists, all the visionaries, all the musicians who were almost certainly considered off their rockers by their peers? They are the people who inspire me most.
When Hilma af Klint, early abstractionist and spiritualist, conjured her Paintings for the Temple at the beginning of the twentieth century, she stipulated they not be shown publicly till twenty years after her death. She believed a public of the future might be more ready to receive them than the public of her time. As a result, these revolutionary visions were not seen for upwards of eighty years. Hilma af Klint was a respected artist in Sweden during her lifetime, yet she chose to keep her most groundbreaking work private.
Maybe she felt a little bit nuts.
Georgia O’Keeffe comes to mind next. She left New York repeatedly to make the long journey west to New Mexico, and in her work, added abstraction to landscape realism and continued evolving artistically, even after all that talk about her flowers. She is remembered for saying “I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life — and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” In other words, when O’Keeffe felt nuts, she just kept going.
I think of Lydia Davis, too, who considers herself a fiction writer but is often called a poet because of her seemingly eccentric manipulation of literary forms. When she finally freed herself from the traditional short story, which she had assumed should be her primary medium for years, because convention says so, the paragraph-long experimental stories for which she is known became, as she puts it in Essays One, “bolder, more confident, and more adventurous” than her previous work. In her words, “they were more of a pleasure to write, and they came more easily. Whereas often until this point writing had felt like hard work,” now she “began to enjoy it.”
Before leaning into her more bizarre impulses, which became her signature and her joy, Davis says she “seemed to think that only Kafka,” not her “or anyone else, could write such odd things.” Even for Davis, departing from the norm felt impossible.
There is something very human about granting the people we admire permission to take big risks, because we consider them worthy, but failing to extend that same generosity to ourselves. If you’re like me, and like Lydia, when you find yourself wanting to stretch even a toe outside the box, you freeze. You slam the door on your bravest ideas.
Who are you, you wonder, to be so bold?
When E.E. Cummings was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1950, he was berated by traditionalists for breaking the mold of what poetry was expected to be. Four years later, in E.E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised, he wrote about what it really means to be an artist: “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
Being nobody-but-yourself in this world often feels like the most nuts choice of all. This list of people bold enough to be themselves could go on to include composers, painters, sculptors, scientists, and thinkers. They all have one thing in common: they defy convention to protect their innermost vision.
But — and this is what is important to remember — this list can also include you and me. Not five or ten years into the future, but right now, just getting through a regular week. Maybe joining the list means making choices about how to live your life that do not feel particularly easy or expected, as it has for me. Maybe it is about arranging words or colors or sounds to reflect the mysteries of being alive.
In the days since I spoke to my therapist, there have still been moments where I’ve felt a little nuts. Yet I am thinking about that differently now. If feeling nuts is a sign of having courage and imagination and something to say — a guiding light that refuses to waver — then maybe, just maybe, I never want to feel sane.
Between you and me—
Hey! Hope you’re all finding some ease and pleasure this week. All is well here. I am reading Ocean Vuong’s new collection, which is as good as everyone says, and trying to stay a grounded and optimistic presence (serene still feels like a stretch) for John, who embarked on a series of significant career moments this week. Playing that role is the great joy of my life. Along with being Herbie’s mom, of course. I have also developed a new habit of watching celebrity beauty routines on Vogue’s YouTube channel. What can I say? I’m a little nuts.
Till next time — take care out there.
The audio version of last week’s essay, which explored the pulsing togetherness of New York City, is available on Spotify, Apple, Substack, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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