Getting Your Head Out of It- on mental health and writing

‘They teach you how to get into that mindset but not out of it’

A conversation I had with an actor a few weeks ago has really stuck with me. Whether it’s as a writer, actor, director or anyone else associated with making theatre (and other work). You naturally absorb some of what you’re working on.

You need to be a certain kind of empath to do some of this work, and that has an impact. That doesn’t mean going scary Daniel Day Lewis levels of ‘method’ (hey whatever works for you boo but you probably don’t need to go and live in the mountains for 3 months unless you’re Bear Grylls). But it does mean whether writer, actor, director or whoever a certain level of being ‘in it’ with whatever the story is. And while we’re keen to praise actors and writers who ‘go there’ to tell a particular kind of story (and directors et al who get them there), we don’t really talk about what happens after- the mental health impact, the fact those stories ‘stay with you’ sometimes. And how you cope while you’re doing it even.

Getting ‘to’ or ‘in’ that frame of mind is actually the ‘easy’ part. Actors are taught tools for that. Directors techniques for developing that. Writers…we largely stumble our way into it, and how we ‘experience’ it is likely fairly personal. For me I always feel like my characters are friends I’m watching go through whatever it is. Without wanting to get too ‘writer wanker’ they kind of largely dictate their own story, after I’ve done the ‘groundwork’ of research and planning. So, I end up sitting with it all in my head for some time before the characters eventually ‘tell me’ the story and it’s on the page. Getting there then in some respects is the easy part. It’s what you do with all that information, and all the emotional fallout after. And for writers, who usually sit with it for far longer than anyone else, when it’s been there for so long, how you learn to let it go- or at least file it away, while preserving your own mental health is a tough one.

I blogged the whole process of my play- writing to production- but I haven’t been able to write about the actual production, or the aftermath. Partly because I couldn’t quite formulate anything to say. Partly because the aftermath of it hit me hard.

The weeks after the play was on were a fairly dark one mentally. It was in part yes, an exhaustion element, adrenaline crash, call it whatever you like of it being ‘over’. The time a play is on is mentally exhausting- the act of doing it is terrifying. It’s the contents of your brain laid bare for people to judge after all. And then it’s over and the world moves on. And after something you’ve put months, sometimes years into- of pouring everything into a project, one with many a setback and ups and downs, there’s bound to be a moment of ‘fallout’ or a ‘crash’. And we need to prepare ourselves better- and support one another.

But equally there’s seeing that world you ‘lived in’ in your head alive again that affects you. Watching the piece, talking about the piece again, you end up with the swirling mass of stories inside your head again. And unlike acting where to a degree you can come up with the artificial division of ‘onstage and off’ there’s not the same ‘off switch’.

My play was about some pretty serious subject matter. Some pretty emotive stuff. And while I’ve gotten something of a reputation for being the go-to for matter- of- fact -chatter about death, and a weird niche knowledge of funeral practices and etiquette (Undertaker YouTube my friends, Undertaker YouTube). All that comes from a place of a need to tell those stories. And that need comes from a place of those things affecting you in one way or another. And there’s not necessarily and off switch for that that comes easily. And I found that hard after this most recent project. In part as well, some unfortunate real-life coinciding with themes in the play- old and new wounds being opened. And we shouldn’t discount that- the real world continues, the things that perhaps inspired the writing to begin with continue- whether that’s political chaos or cancer, those things will continue to exist in the ‘real world’ and perhaps cut deeper for a time, having spent so much time ‘in it’. For me it was a friend losing a relative to cancer, the anniversary of my own father’s death (which I never normally remember let alone mark), a chronic illness flare (probably brought on by stress, but a reminder of feeling like I too was dying exactly five years before). And who knows what else. For about three weeks it felt like I was under a cloud. And trying to take a break between projects, being creatively burnt out, meant I had nowhere to ‘put’ any of that emotion. Again, we learn how to get into it…but not back out again.

You have to put yourself in that headspace, whatever part of the process you belong to, to different degrees, in different ways and for different lengths of time. Being naturally empaths as writers (most of us) those things hit us. All this came together for me because of the place of ‘ripping open’ those elements, those places I’d needed to ‘go to’ in order to write the thing. Because again as ‘artists’ of whatever kind we need to go to those places mentally to make the work. But coming back from them we’re sort of left alone. And it’s a thing we don’t talk about often enough. We talk about the mental health impact of the ‘industry’ side of things. Of rejections, and body image, competitiveness, insecurity. And it’s vital we do. But we forget to talk about the impact of the work itself. Of what telling these stories does to you.

Ultimately, I ran a half marathon and that half ‘fixed me’ then I got properly ill for a week, and then I picked myself up again and moved onto the next project. None of which is a proper way of dealing with the mental health impact of a big project but we all do what we do. But we should as a collective, as an industry be taking all this more seriously.  

And as a footnote, it’s not only the ‘creatives’ in the traditional sense. And I’m not sure where this fits in, but I know in my academic work, in absorbing myself in the world of the AIDS crisis, that history, those narratives, people’s stories…I get the same way. Over the last few years, talking t a few people who have worked on these plays, they say the same thing- it gets under your skin, it affects you. And that’s just my corner of the sky, it’s no doubt the same in other pockets of similarly themed work and history. To do it right we have to be passionate about it, invested in it. But we should also be aware about the impact it has. I feel in my little ‘AIDS theatre’ niche part of a weird club, a little like AA in that we only know what that particular feeling is like- it’s like a historical weight of responsibility and grief. And that’s an interesting headspace to be in. And a fairly niche one.

I remember reading in a book as a kid something along the lines of ‘to make something good you have to give a piece of yourself away and never give it back’ I still believe in that. But I think we all need to get better at putting ourselves back together.