Day 229: The Three Day Rule

The really irritating thing about being a spiritual person is you can't get Just Mad anymore. You're always looking for The Lesson or The Message From The Universe and you can't just throw dishes and be done with it. Everything has to have "deeper meaning" or lead to "personal growth."

It's frickin' annoying.

So it really IRKED me when – after getting blindsided by the Depression People AGAIN at the ELEVENTH BLOODY HOUR – I descended into a blind rage the likes of which I've never experienced.

It was the kind of rage I can only describe as ALCOHOLIC – the rip-the-sink-off-the-wall, eat-a-plate-of-cocaine, drive-a-truck-off-a-bridge kind of fury reserved for addicts and outlaws. An out of control cocktail of self-destruction and homicidal mania.

This? Is not like me at all.

It scared the hell out of me. And I wondered how I'd let things get this far. I'd ignored the Three Day Rule for far too long.

I've learned the hard way that I've got three days without creative Me-Time before the time bomb starts to tick ominously. Before the jungle drums start beating and the air raid sirens start to howl. Before I start yelling for Boyfriend to TAKE COVER because goddamnit SHE'S GONNA BLOW!

It's strange, but it's true.

Creativity is as much a part of my self-care as getting eight hours of sleep at night. If I skip it, there are consequences. If I keep skipping it, things get ugly for those within a 30-foot radius. If I neglect it altogether, the rage goes inward I get suicidally depressed. This is how it works.

Three days to crazy.

But every once and awhile I, very mistakenly, try to get away with it and push my self-care to the bottom of the list.

I don't know how thought I could gut out a couple more weeks of balls-to-the-wall writing for the Depression Project, survive a four-day full-frontal-family weekend (where the only Me-Time I got involved a toilet and a wad of Charmin double-ply) and have enough gas in the tank for two days of shooting a hundred pages of script.

I was very, very wrong.

And I emerged from a molten white rage last night around midnight to find myself tearing a journal almost in two like some kind of steroid-addled Monster Trucker. Smashing all the car windshields on my street with a baseball bat also seemed like a very good idea. It was fucked.

But, since I knew from whence the white rage came, I chose against baseball bats and turned to Julia Cameron instead. I opened up Vein of Gold to a section entitled 'Voluntary Victims,' which goes a little something like: "Sooooo. You didn't give yourself the creative time or space you needed and said Yes to everything everybody asked you and now you're A CERTIFIABLE MENTAL CASE and what exactly did you THINK was going to happen? Hmm?"

I did one of her genius little exercises (in my ravaged journal) and felt better. But I wasn't done yet, so even though it was a quarter past late o'clock, I opened up a story I've been working on (pssst...one of the PARIS stories!).

I felt the train wreck of rage in my head clear away and the knot of barbed wire in my chest loosen. I was WRITING! For the first time since Paris and it was glorious.

I wrote until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore and then slipped into bed beside Boyfriend. Who was still wearing his riot gear and clutching his pepper spray under his chin. Adorable.