Hard Drugs

It feels like something of a cringe thing to say - well, don't you think highly of yourself - but I'll go ahead and say it anyway. In a roundabout manner, so that maybe it sounds less silly.

I keep thinking it's maybe the breathing, except that was hours ago. Maybe this brain-oxygenating, old-ideas-reverberating thing takes more time to work than I would've intuited. But I'm getting such a high. There's a sudden lightness to my thinking, my brain flows in ways it normally stumbles along. Painful, long, self-haggling thoughts. Except not now.

Just now, the pipes are clear, and it doesn't feel like my head is weighted. And I think it should be, but I only think it much later, after the buzz has worn off, but not in the moment. There's no room for thinking in my moment, there's just enough space for my slender self to squeeze through and catch the rhythm by the heel, but not the hell of it, goodness no.

People think artists get hung up on drugs and alcohol because they're loosey-goosey types who didn't know where to draw their lines in the sand. I think that sometimes becomes the case, but I don't think that is initially the case. There's something to going about your life, like any ordinary other person, then finding one day you don't always have to be here.

Which is what art-making tends to do to a person. Any creative pursuit, really.

It's like spending all your life walking about on your feet, only to find one morning that you could walk on your hands just as easily. And not just "could", but "can". It's the rush of reinventing what it means to be human, to think and express yourself, it's escape from the constructed, approved phrases we've crafted for speaking ourselves to one another. It's the most fantastic, sexiest, elating feeling.

And it can be explained, though some pretentious fuckers will tell you otherwise. We've all known it (perhaps). It's not artists who have a monopoly on this feeling.

If you were ever out drinking and got a feeling like a sudden rush, like things don't need to be hard, but also not dull, either. Like you're a free-floating cloud somewhere and you can dance and be the most beautiful, magnetizing thing out there, you've felt it.

If you've ever had sex that isn't a routine or an in-between, soulless vibe, but an active tug on your sleeve to be in this present moment, and notice the brilliant colors of every living thing, as they ripple through you and take you out of your life and your phone screen and your mundanity, then you've felt it.

It is what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as "the flow state", a melting together of action and consciousness. And hey-ho, if you put it like that, it kinda makes sense, no? Sometimes we need someone to bust down the barrier our mind creates between us and other living things. Alcohol knows how to do that. Drugs, too. And sex, sex does that quite well.

But so does art. That's the thing I meant to tell you that sounded cringe and kinda weird in my thinking mind. I was writing just now, and it felt like such a high. Not just "like", it was a high. The conscious thinking that tinkers with what we put out melts away. You get a free pass, your parents aren't looking, you can swing as high as you please. You remove the net from the window and feel the cool breeze. It's your being as is, naked and uninhibited, actively making things. I guess you had to be there.

It's an addictive high, this creation of things, this ability to melt away inhibition and when you sit down to recreate it and fail, it feels like a tremendous slap in the face. You're failing. You're being inauthentic. You're making bad art. You'd do anything to get in that natural flow state, except it doesn't come always. In fact, I don't know how it comes at all, just that you lose all chance if you try and force it or be disingenuous, or try to create with an achey belly, or try to write at four on a Tuesday or...or...or

There's no way of knowing how you get into that state, so we'll look for anything to find it again. To control it. That's the human, logical part of us taking over. It's in our nature to try and control the unpredictable, the surrounding world, and we catch sight of this uncontrollable, unpredictable thing and fall desperately in love with it. We'll do anything to be in that "zone" again, but not just be there.

We need to be in charge of when we're there, how we're there, and these are things that fly straight in the face of flow state. There's a great tragedy that we are, in our core, lion-tamers in love with lions. You kill it by trying to control it, and I suppose it's only appropriate if you look at all the artists who also killed themselves in this desperate chase.

I just wanted to say. I felt like noting somewhere this beautiful, brilliant feeling.

Where in your life do you find this flow?