Stress and writing

By Tiffany Antone

Whoa, hey, what is even happening right now?

SO MUCH.

SO MUCH IS HAPPENING.

And it feels like SO MUCH has been happening for SO LONG that I am SHORT-CIRCUITING. I don’t know if I know how to do this anymore. But what has changed? Hasn’t the world always been in peril in some capacity? Or, maybe it’s more accurate to ask “Hasn’t mankind always been in peril in some capacity?” Why does this moment in time feel so hopelessly perilous?

The 2016 election hit me hard, but I rebounded with radical empathy! I was going to create opportunities for connection! I founded Protest Plays Project for playwrights writing for social change. At the same time, I began working with colleges to create opportunities for playwrights to draft plays rooted in their communities – we would then exchange the plays and read them on our myriad campuses. Radical empathy would save us!

It did not save us.

So I wrote an outlandish feminist sci-fi play that made me laugh even while I held my breath about absolutely everything else. We moved. I had a second child. I wrote postcards to voters. I experienced the Iowa caucuses. I held my breath. Maybe, if we could just get that gaudy, greedy, mistake out of the white house… I’d be able to breathe a little easier.

Then the pandemic.

The fucking pandemic.

I wrote more postcards. I started Plaguewrites, collaboratively writing “pandemic-proof” (aka, outdoor and long-distance) plays with other playwrights trying to DO SOMETHING. My instinct to keep fucking going, innovate, pivot! LEAN IN!, was in full force.

But now, everything from that time period is a swirly knotted mess. George Floyd, Jan 6th, Giuliani’s drip-drip-drippy dye job, online teaching, closed day care, zoom zoom zoooooooom and double-washing my tomatoes…

I turned a play into a short film with our students.
I got diagnosed with Breast Cancer.
I got my tits chopped off, did radiation, completely revised my syllabus for online teaching, then hybrid teaching, then once more for back-to-the-DON’T-YOU-DARE-SAY-“NORMAL”-classroom. All of my students fractured, thin…
Myself fractured.
Thin
(Well, thin in spirit at least. In person, I become thick with emotional eating. Sucking what pleasure I can from every goddam donut, brownie, and buttery potato I can find…)

I wrote more postcards to even more voters.

I finished a too-long-in-the-crock-pot play that no one seems to be too excited about.

What year is it? What even is “time” anymore?

And now there’s another fucking election coming down the pike, with the same candidates as last time, and it’s like, do we really have to?

I’ve got a new play finished. I’m sending it out. I really love it. But… like…does it matter?
Does any of this matter?

I don’t rebound so well anymore. I’m tired. I’m so, so, so, so, tired. And I’m just a middle-aged, de-breasted, middle-class, white lady with kids. How the fuck are YOU?

What are you writing about?

Is it helping you breathe?

Maybe that’s why I keep hitting these keys… writing is order. Scenes move forward. Characters in impossible situations make choices, which have consequences, and I can see it all safely.

And from a distance.

So.
I’m working on some new stuff. Maybe it will help me deal with the unbearable weight of this impossible world.

In the meantime…
I’m still holding my breath.

by Tiffany Antone

Have you read this post about women and submissions on Donna Hoke’s blog yet? It’s super interesting. In it, she talks about how women statistically submit fewer plays than men do, and so how in the world can we hope to achieve gender parity when we’re not even kicking out as many plays as they are? She posits a few ideas as to why we’re not submitting as much work as men, one of which might be that we’re simply not writing as many plays as they are (while admitting she’s not quoting scientific data on the subject) and I think that she’s probably on point with some of it.

Because her thoughts echo thoughts that I’ve been personally mulling over (and freaking out about) the past few months – and it all comes down to a very self-judgmental “Why haven’t I been writing as much as I know I should be/want to/need to if I’m going to reach my goal of becoming a real-live playwriting SUPERSTAR (hahahaha) sometime soon?!”

Tina knows what I’m talking about… I think

I mean, I’ve got time. I’ve got actual time in my schedule to write right now, and instead of being a hyper-productive story machine, I’ve been dragging my feet, occasionally circling the creative drain, and beating myself up about it every step of the way.

And I know that part of my problem is that I’m never JUST thinking about playwriting… When I’m dragging my feet on my written work, I’m dragging my feet on ALL of my work. When I feel creatively stumped, I feel stumped about life. I’ve been down and out and confused about just what the hell was wrong with me for months – which was of course not helping me write anything – and then it hit me:

I don’t know how to turn off the very loud, very panic-stricken part of my brain that is constantly worried about finances and health insurance and the unreliability of my fragile adjunct positions and whether or not I’m making something of myself fast enough to save myself from a life of obscure forgotten penury…

Ever find yourself pulling one of these as you just walk into the bank?

And this monumental (and very loud) worry about my own survival has been clouding the creative waters from which I work. This worry about unmet goals and far-off dreams has been pressurizing every unrealized sentence, turning them into huge ugly stones of depressing non-accomplishments that I don’t know how to move.

And once I realized this, the solution seemed clear: I needed to chill the f*** out! But how?

Maybe I need to look to some of my male contemporaries who have a (seemingly) easier time compartmentalizing tasks and worries.

I imagine inside every guy there is a Peter Griffin telling him when he’s approaching critical mass.

Because I really think that the gents are better at turning off parts of their brains in order to focus on each thing in turn, one at a time.

What a concept.

I mean, I have always considered my ability to juggle multiple ideas/projects/and thoughts at once as one of my biggest assets, but when the juggling gets out of control, it’s no longer a strength but a very paralyzing weakness.

And I don’t think I’m the only woman out here trying to do too many things at once while mentally beating myself up at each step for not being able to give any one of those tasks my full, undivided attention. I feel guilty writing because I’m not out earning money by picking up extra paid freelancing gigs, and I feel guilty working on those paid gigs because they are doing absolutely nothing to move me further up the theatrical or academic pipeline. I worry that the things I want to do aren’t yet earning me a living, and yet I know that they’ll never ever earn a living if I don’t continue to labour away at them in the un-paid now.

But what if I put some of this obsessively negative energy to work through focus. What if I could shut up the Chicken Little part of my brain and double down on patience and faith in myself and learn to work on one thing at a time? What if I can learn how to tell my constantly-~~thinking-~~worrying-about-3-different-things-at-once mind to let go of some of those worries for a little while, and to believe that putting down a few of my “balls” for a little while won’t bring down the entire circus.