I Think I Was a Lot Smarter When I Was Unhappy.

Jessie Morrison

Recently, a friend from my writer’s group called me out for not producing work with the regularity he’d come to expect from me.

“I think I was a lot smarter when I was unhappy,” I told him.

“Well in that case,” he responded, “I must be a genius.”

We’re all familiar with the cliché of the tortured artist.  We admire the suffering of giants like Van Gogh and Hemingway and Woolf nearly as much as we admire their art.  We secretly wonder if such emotional darkness is necessary for creative genius, and we feel both guilty and relieved that we have no desire to fill our pockets with stones and step into a river or cut off our own appendages.

At the moment, I’m experiencing some pretty major life changes, the primary one being that I am getting married next month.   I’m in love, and I’m really, really happy.

I wonder if this is the reason my writing desk is gathering dust.

See, lately, instead of hunching over a computer alone in my cluttered second bedroom, dreaming up scenes and conjuring imaginary people, I’ve been doing things like drinking beer with my fiancée on the front stoop, wedding dress shopping with my mom, and unwrapping shiny new kitchen tools.  Fun things.  Normal things.  Things that well-adjusted people the world over do with regularity, but that Ann Sexton would have shaken her head at, mystified.

I absolutely believe that a certain amount of emotional turmoil is necessary for creativity.  It gives you a way to expel from your churning brain the feelings that are confusing and hurting you, and hopefully, to transform them into something beautiful.  But why is it that sadness gets so much more mileage than happiness?

For me, this is a summer of huge transition.  I’m making  much-needed changes in my professional life. I’m making a lifelong commitment to the man I love.  I’ve lost 12 pounds.  I’ve stopped biting my nails to the bloody quick.  In short, I feel freaking fantastic. But my fear is that in finding happiness, I’m losing a central part of who I am—the writer in me, who by definition, in order to function, must be solitary and inward and alone.

One of the moments when I knew I was going to marry Denis was during an 8 hour drive to Northern Michigan last October when he asked me to explain, in detail, each chapter of the novel I was near completing.  As we drove down the deserted highway, streaking past the orange and red trees of early October, I began to talk, a little stunned that he wanted to listen, a little amazed at the feedback and encouragement he was responding with.  He cared deeply about my writing, and he cared deeply about me.  It was such a simple and profound revelation, but one that I think of whenever somebody asks me, “how did you know he was the one?”

That night, we took a ferry to Mackinac Island, a summer tourist destination that would be shutting down the following weekend for the long, hard winter.  The bars were filled with hotel maids and fudge shop workers, waitresses and carriage drivers, who were partying together one last time before they headed home for Jamaica or Australia or central Illinois.   We stayed out drinking with them until the bars closed, hearing their stories about island culture and the wild times that happen in places where a bunch of young people are flung together far from home.

On the walk home, Denis said, “You should write a story about those people.”

I never have.  But one day soon, I swear that I will.

Categories

Follow us

MORE FASCINATING DETAILS

About

Masthead

Header Image by Kelcey Parker Ervick.

Spot illustrations for Fall/Winter 2023 issue by Dana Emiko Coons

Other spot illustrations courtesy Kelcey Parker Ervick, Sarah Salcedo, & Waringa Hunja

Copyright @ 2010-2023, Hypertext Magazine & Studio, a 501c3 nonprofit.

All rights reserved.

Website design Monique Walters