HELP

Creative Forums Creative Writing
1

The scene is totally unremarkable: a smallish rectangular room, short grey carpetting, a few proffessional degrees on the wall, a desk, a chair and a sofa. You could be anywhere in this office; South Dakota, Halifax, Brussels, in fact I guess it doesn’t even matter where this office is. It’s nowhere, and yet it’s everywhere; by that I mean its nothing and yet you find it just about everywhere…if you know what I mean. In any case, a boy sits fidgeting in the sofa of this room with his eyes cast downwards, the overhanging light casting shadows on his angular face. A man sits directly across from him reading a file at the desk, his back facing the boy.

“Well then,” began the man, swinging abruptly in his chair, “what seems to be the problem, there young fella?”

“I guess I’ve been seeing this lady for a little while and she didn’t really seem able to help me with any of my big questions…”

“What do you mean son?”

“Well I feel like I have this problem. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. Its this sort of paralysing self-consciousness. It’s this neurotic self-evaluation that I am constantly conducting; it’s as if I am always living to impress other people. I can remember being a kid playing hockey and I would pass the puck out into the front of the net, knowing that none of my teammates were there. And I would just pass the puck anyways because I knew that the audience would see me as a hard working player getting the puck where it should be, and the failure would be my teammates’. I know that sound just like some silly childishness, but it’s really pervasive, I feel like its taking over my life.”

“What is your birthdate, Michael?”

“Uh, June 8th, 1986… So I guess I’m not really making any sense, it’s kind of hard to explain. I mean, when you’re a kid, it’s cool to be kind of an exhibitionist, but I’m not a kid anymore. My decisions are important now, and I really don’t want them being influenced by these pressures. I feel like I don’t know anything about myself: you know, it’s impossible to discern what I do to impress and what I do for myself. I don’t really even know what that means but. Ahh… All I’m trying to say is that whenever I set out to do something, whether it’s doing my homework, or going to the gym, I feel like I’m just doing it to improve myself. You know, there’s just no pure enjoyment. For instance I don’t do anything stupid or wasteful like watch TV or follow sports. That might seem like a good thing, but something like watching TV is so bereft of personal benefits that when you’re doing it you know you’re doing it for yourself. And that’s the thing, I don’t know if I do anything for myself anymore.

“Are you taking any medications at the moment, Michael?”

“No. Umm…no. I’m sorry, this probably isn’t making any sense. What I’m trying to say is that everything I do, it feels like I am evaluating and calculating the impact that it will have on my own character and my chances of success in the world. You know I just went through thirteen years of school with my head down just achieving, achieving and now I’m at this crisis point where I don’t really know what I’m doing.

“Do you have any allergies, Michael?”

“No, except bee stings. Haha. Yep, bee stings. So, like, I’m thinking about what I want to do with my life and all I can see is the outside perspective, do you know what I mean? The externals, I think somebody called them. It’s like, when I think about being a lawyer, what I actually think about is myself standing in court berating some witness, or delivering some powerful concluding speech, you know, crescendo after eloquent crescendo. Or if I am a scientists I imagine my Nobel Prize acceptance speech. It’s all from a third person perspective, you know. I’m not actually thinking about what it means to be these things. This is kind of the way I’ve been living my life, from this outside perspective, working tirelessly on my character. But if you remove the externals, you know, remove the audience, then what the hell are you left with? What is my acceptance speech without the applause? And I feel like my whole existence is resting on these externals now, and that if they were to leave, were to slip out from beneath my life, I would be left only with myself, with my own hollow existence and I’m not sure what I would do.

“It sounds to me like you are over-analysing things, Michael. This is a vulnerable time in your life. I know it may seem otherwise, but the decisions you make now aren’t really that important. One day, when you look back, you will see this all as teenage angst, something you got over.”

“Oh, that’s what the other woman said. I know it may seem like it, but I just can’t see myself continuing to live like this. I need to make some changes, or at least some discoveries, you know? If I just put my head down and trudged through another eighteen years of my life, I’m afraid the next time I had a crisis I would see thirty-six wasted years instead of eighteen.”

“Tell you what I can do Michael, I can give you a prescription here for Rotex. This is a drug that decreases the sensitivity of the Serotonin receptors in your brain.”

“Isn’t that what Prozac does?”

“Umm…not really Michael, they operate in vaguely similar ways…it’s all very complicated of course. The imporatant thing is that this will help slow down the train of neurotic thoughts in your head, it will help you day-to-day.”

“But I don’t think…well I guess it’s worth a shot. Thank you Dr. Kaiser.”

“Just call me if you have any problems at all Michael, thank you for the talk. I think you’re going to be just fine.” Michael rose from his chair and nodded to the doctor glibly on his way out. In the street he glanced down at the bottle in his hands. He pulled out one of the multicolored pills and laughed at how dodgy the pill looked under the fuorescent street lamp. He popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed it. So this will dull my thoughts will it. Now I can be happy like everyone else, stop doing unhealthy things like analysing the trajectory of my life. Brilliant headlights brought Michael out from his black reverie and he recognized the doctor driving towards him. He waved to the car, but the doctor seemed preoccupied. He felt like throwing the whole bottle down the gutter, but instead he took another pill. Dull, dull, dull. Pill after pill he swallowed until collapsed into a twitching heap on the ground under the street lamp.

The papers filed this one under the ever growing list of teen suicides brought on from the pressure and stress of competitive university life. The college decided that measures needed to be taken to help their students through these pressures, and Dr. Kaiser was hired on full-time.

2

I liked the way you wrote about working on and acompolishing things for respect from the other. The question the boy poses is one we all should reflect on, I think.

However, I am curious if you yourself ever had such an experience with a psychiatrist? The reason I ask is that I’ve met with a psychologist and it wasn’t like what you’ve written whatsoever (of course, everyone is different, but this just seems really contrived). Is this fantasy or based on real life? Have you had an experience like this?–because if you haven’t, I can’t help but think of Chekhov’s words to his brother (an aspiring writer himself): “Write about only what you know.” That is not to say that you don’t know what you’ve written about, however, it seems like the psychiatrist’s character is very lacking and hollow.

Now, I realize that your trying to universalize this, by saying: “It’s nowhere, and yet it’s everywhere; by that I mean its nothing and yet you find it just about everywhere,” however, that is really a huge generalization, even if you yourself had one or even maybe a few experiences like this. This honestly, in my opinion, simply does not resemble psychotherapy.

3

If the style of charactization of the doctor is viewed as art, then I think it makes sense. He need not be portrayed as a real doctor would act, only has he needs to act to get the point across that the author is trying to make. In that way I liked the story.

The idea of a creative writing forum is a good one, but I’m always leery of the perceived need of a running dialog. Especially the instances where a perons feels compelled to engage in a several page thread over their 15 line poem. To me the beauty of a poem is the way it distills a thought or concept down to its very essense, like a sauce is concentrated thru reduction. To engage in a long dialog about its meaning to me dilutes the power of it and defeats the purpose. JMOHO, however.

4

I see what your saying Phaudrus, yet, I tend to think that criticism can expand art rather than reduce it. For instance, some of the criticism I got on some of the works I posted here really opened my eyes; for as the author, I wasn’t even aware of some of the things people noticed in my own writing. I tend to think, that it’s always helpful for an author to see how people respond and interput the works s/he presents, because many times their responses may be different from the intended effects the author initially had in mind – and that can be very enlightening.

Phaudrus wrote:

See, this is what I didn’t like about the work: the fact that I was keenly aware of the docter simply being used to convey the author’s point. Since this is written like fiction, it didn’t seem right to me, or effective. But, it is just my opinion, so just take from it what you will.

5

You make a point. I guess what constitutes are is subjective. At any rate, I don’t mean to say criticism isn’t useful. But if I were ever to post one of my poems here, I’d resist the urge to explain it in gory detail to all who’d listen, at least before the reader had a chance to chew on it for awhile. To me it’s not so much what I say but what you hear that matters.