Fear, Anxiety and the Over-Saturation Theory
You may not believe this, but I have serious issues with Anxiety as well as Depression and Insomnia. I know my brain all too well, which is both a gift and a curse. And I know that if I give my brain any excuse to obsess darkly over things I cannot change and keep me awake at night it will take it. If I open the door even a sliver for paralyzing Anxiety and debilitating self-doubt, they’re going to shimmy right in and play havoc with my already frazzled psyche.
Much of that stress is professional and financial in nature. In the five years since I went full-time freelance after being laid off by The Dissolve I’ve watched the number of outside columns I used to write for places like Splitsider, Rotten Tomatoes, Decider, The A.V Club and Random Nerds dwindle from eleven or twelve over a series of websites to just two for my kindly benefactors TCM Backlot, The Fractured Mirror and First and Last.
The loss of income sucks when you’re living paycheck to paycheck the way I am but what bothered me just as much was the uncertainty, waiting and dread. It sucked spending agonizing years waiting for the other shoe to drop, to get that bloodlessly worded email letting me know that yet another column was being cancelled, a victim of perpetually falling page-views and the ever-shifting needs of an increasingly impossible pop culture landscape.
When I was head writer for The A.V Club and then a staff writer for the Dissolve, Pitchfork’s short-lived but beloved film site, I thought that I did not have the psychological constitution or thick skin to make it as a freelancer, that the rejection and uncertainty and lack of stability would destroy me..
You know what? I wasn’t entirely wrong. I wasn’t wrong at all but what I did not perhaps realize at that point was that being a staff writer these days involves an awful lot of uncertainty and instability as well, what with seemingly every website or newspaper either going out of business or engaging in massive layoffs to stay afloat. I also did not realize that I wouldn’t necessarily have a choice going forward, that it wouldn’t be salaried, full-time employment or riskier but potentially more lucrative and creatively satisfying freelancing so much as the scary world of freelancing or nothing.
I know that if my brain is obsessing darkly about one thing and one thing only then whenever my mind is not occupied by work or family or entertainment it will brood bleakly and apocalyptically about that singular subject of my brain’s neurotic, monomaniacal focus. Whatever I’m stressed and obsessed about will become my entire world, blocking out more fruitful and constructive endeavors.
That is why I subscribe to what I have dubbed the Over-Saturation Theory. If your brain only has one primary thing to worry about, then it will obsess about it to an unhealthy and self-defeating degree. But if you have five or six or seven stress inducers in your life simultaneously then your brain will be so overwhelmed and overloaded that it will not have the time or the space or the energy to worry about all those things simultaneously.
Ideally, your brain should be so full of potential stressors that most days you can’t even remember some of them. I’m pleased to say that there’s shit that I could not stop thinking about six years ago or eight years ago, that seemed like matters of utmost importance but that have completely disappeared from my memory in that time.
Of course the Over-Saturation Theory only works if you’re willing to put yourself out there and aggressively pursue opportunities that could lead to rejection and hurt. That’s historically been difficult for me but I am doggedly pursuing it all the same because I need to get the fuck out of my own way professionally and emotionally because my book deserves it and my readers deserve it and my family in particular deserve a version of me who realizes his potential instead of letting his fear of the world and its phantom horrors keep him from being everything that he can be.
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place and get sweet Weird Accordion to Al merchandise like tee-shirts, stickers, posters and hats by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace/merch
And/or buy my new book, The Weird Accordion to Al, on paperback over at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion+to+al&qid=1580332091&sr=8-1