Your Escort To The Edge

If you say you are not a singer, does that mean you never sing? If you say you are not a dancer, does that mean you never dance? If you say you are not normal, does that mean you are crazy? Why must there be this wall between the creatives (the crazies) and the supposed non-creatives ( normals).My granddaughter came to the dinner table one night and said, “Gigi ( that’s my grandmother name), what is this thing called normal?” Our family has never been that. She was comparing herself to the kids she met in her new school. We are made up of painters, dancers, singers, and musicians. We are also business men and women and sensitive hard-working humans. I would never call us normal. But it made me think that we really do not know what normal IS. And we do bandy about the word “crazy” a little too much. What exactly is the normal of now? It is good to be weird but bad to be crazy?  By most people’s standards my entertainment business friends are the crazy ones. I am surrounded by varying degrees of pathology-bipolar, narcissistic, dreamers pushing their creative agendas. I like these people. I generally like the way their brains work. They are often shy, funny-haired, nervous, outside folk. They are risk takers who don’t mind sharing endless scripts, stories, and projects with strangers. In a word, they are interesting. They would never pronounce themselves “not a dancer or a singer” and would have no problem breaking into a tone-deaf version of “My Girl” while dancing like Elaine in Seinfeld. This is MY normal. If we are outside of something, then where is the edge?Today I was called to counsel a writer friend who is plagued with rage, depression, and brilliance. Yes a certain kind of brilliance is like a disease because it calls for immediate action which most assuredly goes against “normal and acceptable”. The medicine for this is some form of running down the street with your hair on fire, literally or figuratively. Or maybe the afflicted needs to wrap herself in a blanket like a taco, stay in bed for three days, and contain the ideas into small packages which can be later sold to clients. My friend had just stayed up all night writing a play that was in her head. She had to get out, an exorcism of sorts, and then get up and drive her child to school. Although she has a successful career and a beautiful family, she often longs to run away, alone in an RV, free of everything except for her next book or short story. I was forced to have the “mental-health-for-creatives talk” with her. This is how it goes….You can vent this stuff like steam through the cracks in your armor. You can hide it in blankets or bury it like a pig in a hole filled with hot coals. It cooks, it steams, it sends out a sweet odor. You WILL be haunted by it until a new idea comes along that takes its place. Maybe you can you write it down in long hand on a yellow pad and then rip it up. I like driving west into the sun as fast as I can. That has always worked for me. Very very loud punk or rap music also works. Once you find your hiding spot or your vents, you can expect the pressure to let up a bit. It never goes away completely though. Big ideas just cook like that roasted pig-long and deep. Now if you are trained as a therapist or a psychiatrist, you’re probably thinking this advice is not really medically sound. But it works for teenagers and my “crazy” friends. Some of them have won awards for their long-roasted pigs/ideas/books/songs. Like Jack Kerouac, “I go for the mad ones who burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles…” I told my granddaughter that being normal is over rated. She went off happily to write a song. I didn’t tell her that she might need to develop some coping skills someday for her raging mind churning out ideas faster than a sausage factory. Maybe the new normal is acceptance of this kind of mind. I hope so because I don’t plan to stop the burning.

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