Pick Your Poison

Everybody seems to enjoy some thing that will slowly kill them.  The classic ones are smoking and drinking.  The next classic one is eating junk food. Some people actually work themselves too hard or stretch themselves too thin.  Whatever the specific, it generally ends up working the same way.

Life is stressful.  No matter how strong we are mentally, stress will eventually get the better of us if we let it go.  So we all come up with stress relievers.  They're generally chemicals we're putting into our bodies (nicotine, alcohol, THC, endorphins) which make us feel better.  We relax, drop some of the stress, and are able to handle whatever else comes up in the mean time.  The only drawback is all of the negative side effects.  In short, the things we're doing to handle the stress of life are also causing harm to our body.

I find that writing has acted as both stressor and stress reliever.  A deadline or a frustration with quality turns this into a stressful, loveless project.  However, there are also times where working on a story is all I want to do because of how much joy it brings me.

The funny thing about writing as a stress reliever is that it is still a poison of sorts.  For one thing, I always stay up way later into the night when I am reading, so I am never getting enough sleep.  For another thing, when I am writing all the time, I give up any time I could have spent doing anything else.  In that case, it is not a physical poison, but one that slowly kills my social life.

Still, I would think that there are far worse ways to kill yourself slowly.  At least when you are writing, you are being productive, actually creating something for your effort.