Your brain hasn’t been producing much useful material lately. Why is that? Drugs and anxiety have something to do with it, I’d say. The interplay of the two, the cycle they call forth in malignant collaboration.
Since moving to America, you’ve become more concerned with the quality of your social performances. After parties, you ponder whether you were as funny as usual. That question implies others: Are you usually funny? When were you last funny? You’re not sure. You can’t remember. Why can’t you remember? The uppers, probably. You forget to make memories when they’re speeding you through the day. Adderall is an igloo on wheels.
I have yet to see evidence that the speed tangibly improves the quality of your work. I doubt you believe that yourself. Instead, I assume that you take it because you find your days insufferable and are desperate to see them end quickly. In any case, it’s important to remain honest with yourself about its downsides. In your case: faltering creativity, swinging moods, insane writing hours (7pm to 7am, and forgot to re-park his car before street-cleaning arrived). You two are bad for each other. Adderall is ruining your brain and you’re hurting its reputation.
Of course, you didn’t first break out in social anxiety upon arrival in America. Already as a child in Berlin, you were diagnosed with a mild form of Asperger’s. Sure, that was your mother’s diagnosis and, strictly speaking, she possessed neither the relevant paperwork nor the necessary professional experience to offer you binding analysis, but she was an expert on feelings and your family pathologies, and the symptoms she described corresponded perfectly to your childhood memories of social isolation and hiding behind things. As you grew older, you picked up ways of masking your panic. In junior high, you smoked cigarettes in exaggerated poses to keep control of your hands and distract from your uneasiness. Soon, you started smoking pot to take the pressure off your eyes, adding that paper-mâché stone-face to your repertoire. That worked well. That got you writing and helped you introduce yourself to countless (in retrospect, questionable) friends and bedfellows.
Back home, you found plenty of time for self-experimentation and mask design. In Berlin, there were no careers on offer. The days were indecisive. Close friends hung out all week. Scruffy thirty-somethings took over the soccer-cages from noon onwards. After studying a drug habit (alternatively: Islam) for a couple years, high school graduates either took jobs in call centers (“research & computers”), catering (“sous chef”) or flyer distribution (“party organizer”); others interned with their career intern parents. Even overachievers waited until their late twenties to complete their degrees and then moved to Australia or Thailand for a few years to ponder their career path and sexual orientation. In New York, you found life a lot more competitive. You encountered 19-year-olds already fretting about their long-term career prospects. Even friendship seemed market-based. Folks at college were wildly concerned with the integrity of their personal brands and strategic about their associations. Friendships here appeared to be more fickle, less forgiving; your American friends were less generous with their time, regardless of their actual workload.
Pete and Josh, the guys you partied with for most of freshman year, enjoyed reviewing the night’s performances over brunch the next morning. “You were in good form, yesterday,” Pete said to you once. You were baffled by that. It had never occurred to you that your form varied. After making a proper fool of yourself that one summer night - oversharing with girls and fighting with that bum - you didn’t hear from him for weeks and entertained the appropriate suspicions. The term social liability took root in your consciousness. You worried about becoming one because of your inconsistent performances, your windsock mood swings and, increasingly, your professional incompetence.
Unlike in Europe, where you’d worked slowly and aimlessly, you suddenly felt the need to rapidly assemble a body of functional work. Unfortunately, you were unable to readjust your operating speed. That’s why you boarded the A-train in the first place. Now you’re stranded, nearing wintry far rockaway, beyond transfer — a social wreck producing desolate poetry, whining, for all to hear, about an oppressive host culture that you never took the time to understand. Even your sense of humor is balding. Maybe you’re just not a writer.
