Wine in a can. That, my friends, is representative of the darkest that a dark time can get. Picture a young Hannah, a sophomore in college with the dewy freshness of being away from home for the first time finally worn off. I was barely employed at a job I hated, struggling through my math and science classes, and wishing that my literature courses would stretch me more. My boyfriend was living in Argentina, I had very few friends, and more than enough time to feel very, very sorry for myself.
At the time, I had only taken a few introductory lit classes, and they were all (in my haughty opinion) boring and easy. I mean, this was my higher education for god’s sake! I needed to learn! I needed to wear thick glasses and read Kerouac underneath old oak trees on campus and make everyone feel intimidated by my intelligence and suave coolness! I needed to brag about my short stories that I was writing on my godawful electric typewriter that I could barely lift. I needed intellectual companions who would discuss their opinions about the nature of the Picaresque novel with me at coffee shops! I wasn’t asking for much, people.
Disappointment settled on me as I began to realize that:
A. I had unrealistic expectations of what college was supposed to be like
B. I had become an asshole who was ignoring the few friends I already had
So naturally, instead of doing anything to salvage the situation, I dragged out my aforementioned typewriter and began banging out story after story about damaged, unhappy, un-fixable people who I was sure were thinly veiled versions of my tortured self. They were unlucky in love, had enormous daddy issues, and said lots of curse words. I was so proud. This was my destiny, and if it was my destiny to be miserable and write genius fiction, then so be it.
I decided that I should start smoking and drinking since that’s what serious writers do, and so I began, rather shakily, down the road to badassdom. I was terrible at it. It was hard to keep up the affect of aloof anger and literary-ness when I had to take a shower after every cigarette I smoked and the only wine we had was canned. Who in the hell buys canned wine? Who even thought of that? I’d like to exchange words with that person. Regardless, it was what was on top of our apartment refrigerator in large quantities, so canned wine it was.
I was literally forcing myself to be unhappy, and it was working. I sank into a hole that I began to think I was never going to escape from, and it didn’t feel cool anymore. It just felt lonely. I was ignoring my best friend, and constantly complaining to her that I didn’t have friends anymore. To this day, that is what I regret the most about that terrible year, that I undervalued and ignored the person who reached her hands out to help me the entire time.
Eventually, I transferred schools, moved to a new city, and started drinking wine from glass bottles. My boyfriend came home, I got a job I liked, I began to study under authors like Tom Franklin and Jack Pendarvis, and life began to creep back in. Every now and then, I would pull out the giant typewriter when I felt blue, and I’d stamp out a quick, sad, story, which all of the sudden felt like they had a real, tangible stomach-sinking melancholy to them, even though I wasn’t so sad anymore.
Right before I graduated from college I put my typewriter away for good. I associated good writing with inexplicable, cancerous sadness, and I didn’t want to be sad anymore, I wanted to be loved by other people, and I wanted to love them back. It felt like I was incapable of loving things besides myself in that dark time. The sad thing is, I never found the balance. I stopped writing fiction for good, and years later, I still miss that stupid, terrible typewriter.
I go back every now and then and read what I wrote in college and marvel at it how decent it actually is. It almost proves to me that misery breeds creativity, which I want so badly to be a lie. Was Hemingway’s genius really fueled by his alcoholism and anger? Would Virginia Woolf’s writing have been mediocre if she had felt loved and content, and not always trapped under watchful eyes? I so wish I had an answer to this question, and I guess it’s because I want to feel like I made the right decision. That by deciding not to write, I decided to live. But that feels wrong. It feels like I should be able to have both. I just don’t know.
Incidentally, someone wrote a book about the connection between alcoholism and genius. It’s called The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking by Olivia Laing.
Written by Hannah
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