Vania 3.0 as explained to a friend....

So had a friend ask me recently about my recent play, and the story behind it all. It'd been years since we'd seen each other, and we'd only reconnected for the first time in almost 10 years last -- what? June? May even?

I remember particularly that when he was last in Knoxville, we were good friends, but I was waist deep in a depression that had become over the years nearly crippling. God(s) love him, he was one of those people who, when I started picking up on his and his girlfriend's body language showing awkwardness around me, admitted that they were getting frustrated with me because it was hard to listen to someone who complained all the time but didn't do anything about it.

Can't remember exactly how he phrased it.

At the time, I told him, actually, that I quite understood. And I hardly ever saw him and his girlfriend again. And I rarely brought up any of my depression issues again to him. And increasingly, I rarely brought it up to anyone else again. I didn't want to be a burden.

It was only years later that I began to get a little angry about it. But as angry as I was about how cruel it felt to be told to shut up about my depression, I was also angry at the very real predicament depression puts you in.

If you haven't experienced depression personally, it is next to impossible to rely on your friends as a support structure, because you are imposing a burden on them. And yet, the most critical part of getting past crippling depression is to relay on your support structure until you are more capable of using your own coping skills.

But that was then. 14 or 15 years ago. When my practical world was steadily shrinking down and it was almost to the point where I had to kill myself or have a miracle to keep myself sane. My how perspectives can really play with your world.


Well, I recently reconnected with this old friend of mine, after he and I both had spent over 10 years almost entirely separated a continent apart living our own lives. It'd been a while since I had an opportunity, for work or otherwise, to make a trip to San Francisco, where he lives, and he'd hardly made a trip to Knoxville at all since he moved out there.

Then a few months ago, we reconnected on Facebook (the theme of my life this year especially) and lo' and behold, he was coming into town! We got to spend some time together, got caught up on the latest, and then he left.

And as I've mentioned before, I then got back into theater for the first time in nearly 20 years, and I got a hankering to get back into a long lost love, writing stories....

Well, Don, my friend, got interested in my posts about my play, and decided to drop a line on Facebook and ask me about what was behind it all. I thought it was worth sharing here.

Don

Those pictures Patty Pope posted. wowow. beautiful. Hey! how'd the play go? what's the story there?

Vania Smrkovski

Today at 9:35am

Those pics were taken forever ago, back when we were all still in school, back even when we'd only just first met, or even before that. But then, perhaps you can tell. If you put my and my brother in law side by side with those pics, you'd be much more likely to say that they look like him than me. It's weird to see them. The story behind the play? Hmmm..... There are two answers to that. The briefer (which I guess is not all that brief) one is that, as is so common on Facebook, my circle of Facebook Friends grew by invading a different time period of my life, by having a random friend from my past connect, and then connecting with all of their friends who I also knew from that time period. This year was the most intense, starting from January or even late last year, and connecting with people from iPIX, from my counseling days, from my frakking High School days in Illinois! [Note: I moved to Tennessee during my 4th year in high school.] And then at last from those few years around 1990 where I did some theater here in Knoxville. An actress friend, Lisa, found me and we got to talking quite a bit, and she started egging me on to get back into theater after she found out that I'd been playing around with the idea recently. (Lisa was one who was really pushing me to keep at my writing way back when in the early 90s.) After a month of catching up, she told me about auditions for Picnic, and I got totally stoked, and my life has been amazing since I auditioned, got a part and performed for the first time in nearly two decades. The longer answer is this. After my breakdown, which I felt was largely caused by my depression and feelings of being unable to connect with people, but also feelings that I was not cut out to do anything meaningful, especially in art, writing, acting, etc, I spent most of my years focused on the task of learning how and accepting being an ordinary 9 to 5 worker bee, sheeple, whatever you want to call it. I literally made the decision that if I was determined to commit suicide, might as well kill off the writer, actor, dreamer that was trying to achieve impossible dreams, but leave the ordinary guy in me to still have some kind of life, even if it was totally unextraordinary. (Can't even say "ordinary".) After about 7 or so years of this, becoming an increasingly successful programmer, I started having these scary moments where I wanted to write again, to dream of doing something grand. By that time, I looked at this as if it was a symptom of depression, I would feel panic attacks, full on anxiety, so I suppressed the urges as best I could, but after a while I started wondering if I might, in my new "Vania 2.0", be able to do it again in a way that wouldn't create the anxieties and false , unrealistic expectations I had that brought me to my knees before. This time I was focused on the problem as an ADD problem, since that was a theme in my self-care at the time (I did actually get diagnosed with neurological tests, if you're curious). How do I organize notes, character studies, plot summaries, timelines, snippets of writing in such a way that I could be inspired, write, walk away and still have the body of work collected in increasingly large collections of stuff that I might one day be ready to tackle full on. How could I learn to re-learn all of the life of a writer I once knew. I had forgotten everything I knew, all of the little things like looking at people in a restaurant and absentmindedly wondering if any of my characters might say similar things, or driving down the road and spontaneously imagining a new twist or piece of evolution of the story. When the above mentioned nagging to get back into theater happened, I'm starting to think I hit a watershed moment where I was at a proverbial cliff and I had to choose to jump. And I had friends who kept egging me on to do those creative things again, people who knew me back then and wanted me to have that happy feeling once more, and I jumped. Even before I really knew what I was doing. Don, these last few months have been absolutely terrifying, thrilling, overwhelming and liberating for me! For the first time in over 13 years, I am feeling a sense of confluence in my life, a series of events and experiences that are conspiring to change my course again. I feel like I am heading to Vania 3.0. Everything terrible, remarkable and amazing has been happening. On the terrible side, my marriage has been called into question. My wife wasn't prepared for this new commitment, this new mistress called the theater. And she will not be prepared for the writer if I let him out to play again. Besides, I have also realized that in the process of learning to tend to my own wounds these past 13 years, I have unwittingly allowed my self esteem to be diminished by her. Not out of any sense of overt abuse on her part, but from the natural give and take compromises one tends to do in relationships. Meanwhile, I am hanging out with that singularly exceptional group of people known as the theater crowd. I hadn't realized how different they were until Olya came to an outing with us after a show. She felt more lost there than I ever felt with her and vet school colleagues. If you remember "Freaks" and can remember the nice suit guy taking the dainty lady to meet his circus freak friends, that's how I suddenly felt with this thespian crowd. And I realized that it was time to start feeding my muse again. That it wasn't just about writing in the dark rooms of my home. I had to nurture that other side of me again. The last ten years have been spent tending to the ordinary guy in me, trying to build a strong foundation, a core of being that could help me weather the bad times, and manage the bills and finances. Now, with that task done, I realize it is time to begin preparations for Vania 3.0. The artist didn't die of suicide after all. And now it is time for me to nurture him to grow, give him a playground, give him paper and a chance to write the story he wants to tell. I really don't know what will come of it. Somehow my sharing all of this with my circle of friends has unexpectedly inspired some of my friends to start writing and exploring, too, and they are making more progress and writing and doing than I am. Maybe it's my core, methodical self managing the show, but I'm tending a garden here, and instead of using fertilizer and UV lamps to get really fast growth for quick harvesting, I am working on the process, trying to learn how to live like an artist again. I may never get around to actually writing again, but I'm trying to remind myself that the life of the artist, the living and thinking like an artist, is really the first goal. Tackling the fear of failure by simply loving the act itself. "Picnic" went resoundingly well. I have a short list of things I'd like to have done better, but I am very pleased with how I did on my first play since before you and I even met, and the director has invited me to join in his upcoming production of The Diary of Anne Frank for September (I play Mr. Van Daan). I have some friends who are hounding me to start posting some writing, and I'm still actively finding ways to explore the process and how to integrate it into my life. Olya and I are seeking counseling, which I think we need (we have had some very nasty arguments, and well there are other issues), but in the process, our counselor has also been my personal counselor and has had some interesting things to say about how he thinks I have never really had a suitable father figure and the resulting self-esteem is really something that has been keeping me from focusing and challenging myself. Whatever the truth of all of that, he seems to have some interesting notions of how I can improve some things in my life, and I'm excited. Vania 3.0 is happening, and it's largely happening without much effort on my part. Things outside of my control are changing, and I am often reacting instead of planning. It allows me to focus on responding and nudging things here and there, learning and hopefully growing. I am fascinated to see where it will all go. So that's it. That's the story. The upgrade to Vania 3.0 is free for you. Or maybe I'll charge you a sushi/sake meal next time I'm out there.

As a general update, I haven't been doing a lot of writing yet. But I've been following the book "The Artist's Way" and have been trying to diligently (not so much) do my "daily pages" where I write 3 pages of whatever is on my mind. The idea is that it's a toxic brain dump that helps clear your head of the distractions and stresses that cause your writer's (or artist's) block.

But I said up front it was going to be a long term rewiring of me. Vania 3.0 doesn't get to happen over night, so I'm not discouraged, yet.

And I am very thankful that I have had some new friends and some already dear friends nagging the hell out of me to get something out there for them to read. I may end up doing that very soon.

Writing Beyond My Current Abilities

I have been writing a book for twenty years.

Now, that's quite an oversimplification, to be sure. It started out as a short story in high school that I insisted was going to be the beginning of a career. Soon the short story evolved into a novella, and then into a series of novels, all before even beginning to put pen to paper and writing.

Now, that, too, is an oversimplification. I did write. In high school, and then in college, I did write. I wrote pages and pages of free-style poems that, I thought, were going to show my budding genius and build the foundation of a successful career as a writer and a thinker. I imagined I would be invited to do speeches and readings. My life would finally make sense.

Now that.... that's not really an oversimplification. Though I sometimes wish it were. See, those years... well those years were very problematic. Without going into nauseating detail, suffice to say that I had years of depression to face and years of recovery after that yet to go. At the time, this craving to write, to act, to philosophize, all of this came out of a need to feel special, worthy, to fill that void inside of me, and it ultimately kept me from actually facing the hard work that I needed to do to really prepare to be a writer.

Those who have experienced mental illness in various forms and degrees can probably understand, much more quickly than most others who have not, that the mind can have an immense power over one's well being and sense of self. The very part that controls the gates of logic and self-care is sick! The very part that says "well, that's not very productive of you, moaning in the corner" is shunted aside by a foreboding, a palpable, physical sensation of fear (in the case of depression, at least) that says that you are worthless, leaching oxygen out of the air that could be breathed in by others more worthy than you.

Wow. That's enough of that, I think.

And yet, yep, yep, this is how I lived the years of the early to mid 90s. With an absolute certainty that I had found myself in a corner, the long end of a bad choice in a maze. And I was very, very seriously considering suicide.

(What does this have to do with writing a bloody book?!)

All of the sordid details of that little death spiral I will share when plied with alcohol in a safe environment. Maybe. But suffice to say that one of a small number of decisions and discoveries I made to help me get out of that funk was the realization that a big part of my depression was drawn from the belief that the only skill and career I had left as an option was writing. And my muse was gone. I was no longer inspired to write. None of what I wrote was compelling. My little nuggets of gold that I had in my hand, my creativity, had turned into lumps of tin.

So I decided to go ahead and let myself suicide.

I killed that part of me that was the actor, the writer, the dreamer, the philosophizer. I decide though that I would let the other half of me -- the boring worker, the 9-to-5er that came home and paid bills and watched the parade go by, fighting the impulse to run onto the streets and join in the fun -- to live on.

And for 10 years, I did just that. I had developed almost a phobia of anything of the creative in me. The very consideration of committing to a writing project would make me shake and sweat. Accuse me of being dramatic, and I'll stare you down with such conviction you'll walk away shaking your head. I was terrified.

And then time passed.

And friends reconnected.

And old memories came back to the surface.

And like Lazarus himself, that corpsed artist inside of me started belching up putrid coughs warning me that things were going to change around here, buddy! Things are going to change! And somehow I was ready for it.

I had spent 10 years recovering from depression and building my life from the ground up, developing a stable inner core that I could rely on.

(So at last we get on with the Writing??)

Besides the depression, I also had to face a late-diagnosed ADD. Seems to have been integrally involved with my depression, as it was a large part of the reason I could not commit to projects of nearly any kind long term, and certainly explained why I wrote great when I was inspired (short, frantic and mad bursts of writing till the wee hours of the morning!), but couldn't organize a thought for five minutes when I wasn't. As a creative (and successful) friend once put it, "At first we write because we are inspired. Later, we are inspired because we write." Well, it seems I had not figured out how to transition to that later stage.

And yet this process of tending to my core, building on my center, growing, has also led me to learn new tools, ways to write things down and track them, keep them around, knowing that I can use them later.

(Like when you finally get to the Writing part of this essay!)

Like now. When I finally face the realization that I really do want to write this long, fabled book again.

I last left my writing as a notion of a series of books that explored the nature of reality and its experience in a very direct, personal way for the hero of the story. Fortunately, I did not throw most of my writing away, choosing instead to pack it in boxes and wrap it in so much tape that it could easily be confused as a bean bag (though not a very squishy one) wrapped in a shopping bag and... well... tape.

Over the years before my breakdown, I had somehow got it in my head that ultimately I could not bring myself to write several books in separate worlds, all with their own history and characters. The more I found myself exploring the nature of the experience of reality, the more the universe itself had to be, I argued, the same universe. Different people see the world in entirely different ways, be it two crazy loony artists or two pragmatic business executives. The only way I could compellingly explore that was to drop the convenient dishonesty of creating a different universe from scratch each time I started a new story. Each story had to be part of the same world.

I started calling my project TGAEN. Or, "The Great American Existential Novel".

Now, here I am, facing the challenge I have set before me. And I realize I have to re-learn the process of writing. Practically the whole process of creating. I am a different person, who is more aware of his failings and strengths and tools. And I have set before me a task that is far beyond my current skill set.

I have a story that will likely be broken up into several novels. I still don't really know the main character, or the rules, or "laws of physics" I will be applying. In terms of meaning, message, take-away, inspiration, hell even in terms of conflict/resolution, I am completely unclear.

What I have is a series of very tantalizing back-story notes, an overarching tale of existence and the transformation of characters from the very beginning of time, themes that are difficult to convey to even me, who is describing and discovering them!

I am using Google Notebooks and Google Documents to track articles, quotes and ideas that seem to resonate with my project. I use my hand-held smart phone to coordinate much of this and to review. And recently I purchased a LiveScribe digital pen, thinking that maybe one problem is that, since I entered the world of the World Wide Web, perhaps I walked away from the one avenue my muse required. Hand to pen to paper.....

I have topics and themes and ideas and character sketches that are more complex in this vaporous stage than I can organize in my ADD-ridden brain.

I am nervous. Shaking -- just a little. And I am excited as hell. Even if I work on this till the day I die of old age, it will be the most enjoyable project I've ever done.

However, I'd like to make more progress than this.


Is there anyone who has suggestions, resources, ideas? Do I pay for a writer's coach, go to every writer's retreat? How to I manage to track and organize my story, when I am not yet even at the stage that I know what my story is going to be?

Who has found themselves in the same situations, facing a task that was larger than they were, and how did you break it down, and keep yourself motivated and on task?

I am interested in meeting anyone who can share their experiences and their tricks of the trade. Now that I have a paying career during the day, this is not about a desperate act of finding something useful to do. This is about finding out why this book won't let me go....

And finding out how it ends.