Summer’s Hottest Trend: Crashing Out
Has anyone seen my mind?
Hi friends!
Well, it’s July, we are officially halfway through this year, and the vibes are now weapons-grade. I thought the mood radiating from my demented little phone screen was collective stress, but the self-appointed warden of the social media gulag we’re trapped in said it’s actually world peace. At least I don’t waste my energy on nuclear anxiety. If I get nuked, that’s none of my business. I’ve had a good run, and the only way I’m returning to this planet is if, in my next life, I’m a pampered chihuahua cherished by a nice old lady.
Everything is so loud right now and the intensity feels like the drawback before a tsunami. Maybe you’re staying afloat by white-knuckling whatever still feels solid, or maybe, like me last week, you're opening your laptop and spiraling at a Coffee Bean. But in this world, where a fatwa has been called against any semblance of normalcy, spiraling is for amateurs.
This summer, anyone who knows what they’re doing is crashing out completely.
What is crashing out?
A shameless public crying jag. Texting everyone you know to see who has a bunker connect. Believing the psychics on TikTok. Dropping the f-bomb on live TV when you can’t get Israel and Iran to stop dropping bombs by decreeing it in one of your bootleg tweets.
The exact definition is not as important as the feeling it evokes. To me, crashing out feels like the scaffolding holding up my last three brain cells has been compromised and any illusion of stability is gone. I am free from the burden of sanity. And then I need to go in the bush and weep.
How can I crash out effectively?
You can spiral about pretty much anything, but to have a proper crash out, there needs to be some sort of haunting story attached. “I think it’s World War III” is spiral-ready, but for a complete crash out, it requires some meat. I know some of us are better storytellers than others, so if you need ideas, “I think it’s World War III and I’m still single” and “I think it’s World War III and I’m tits deep in a writing project about how insane everything is” both worked really well for me. But for the past couple of weeks, it’s the latter that has helped me crash out most effectively.
Anatomy of a Crash Out
A few weeks ago, just after Elon’s post-breakup meltdown, at the height of the LA anti-ICE “riots” (a response to our neighbors being rounded up and taken in broad daylight), but before America bombed Iran, I went for a mid-afternoon walk because I needed to remove myself from the news alerts and ruminate in motion instead. I made it a solid 10 blocks when I turned a corner and suddenly decided: I can’t live like this. The “like this” being “trapped in a fucking torture chamber of sad and terrifying news that I can’t seem to stop looking at.”
There are some people (we all know them) who are martyrs for their misery, but I’ve never been very good at feeling bad. Some of our behavior develops in response to the life we live, and some of it seems to come baked in. According to family lore, I toilet trained myself just after I turned two because, in my mother’s words, “you got sick of sitting in your own shit.”1 And that makes me think that I was born with this impulse for improvement.
It was my improvement impulse that made me start writing about all of this in the first place. After the pandemic, everything felt too insane, and I needed an outlet. I know that the only way out is through, but I thought, if I must move through this madness indefinitely, at least I can put a name to it. And so was born the Age of Unhingement™.
Transmuting the chaos into text does help — sometimes a lot — but thinking about the state of the world too deeply right now is, for obvious reasons that I won’t list because nobody’s cortisol needs that, a little bit much. Which is why, since November, I have been avoiding the Unhingement-themed book proposal that I spent most of last year obsessively working on. Until my “I can’t live like this” moment made me decide that it was time for me to get back to it and finish what I started.
Fresh wind in my sails, I wrote another draft of an essay I’ve been rewriting over and over again since last September, and emailed it to the agent I’ve been working with to see if she had any thoughts. Another major reason I haven’t finished this new draft of my book proposal is that I live in a deadline-less abyss and can’t find the strength to trick myself into feeling a sense of urgency. She emailed me back way too fast, liked the new draft of my essay, and we agreed on a soft deadline for my book proposal. But once I actually sat down to work, I was grossed out by my own optimism. Now I’m overwhelmed by the state of affairs, wondering why I ever did any of this, and ready to assume a new identity if that will get me out of what needs to get done.
The best part of a creative project is obviously before any of the actual work begins, when you get to live purely in the realm of ideas, infinite outcomes, and soul-stirring daydreams of grandeur. Reality notoriously bites, but Fantasyland, now THAT is a place where I’d buy lakefront property. To me, there’s nothing better than a brand-new journey untethered from the burdens of experience and logic. I think that’s why The Fool is one of my favorite symbols in tarot. The Fool chooses curiosity over certainty. The Fool doesn’t know where she’s going, but she’ll figure it out as she goes. And when I left Fantasyland in February 2024 and wrote the first draft of this book proposal in a little over two months, I was a magnificent fool and had no idea what I was getting myself into, or I never would have begun.
Me being me, I had a literal vision of this book where I saw the cover and had to follow it without question. I didn’t know the actual elements of a book proposal or what the word count should be, but my intention was to write a first draft, create my own clever little format, and try to get it to an agent who would help me fix it (delusion works well for me). I was used to making silly videos and memes and writing this newsletter that gets immediate feedback. It never even occurred to me that the writing process could get lonely while working on a big project. In my mind, writing was an escape plan from social media, and knowing all I know, I can’t believe that I didn’t realize an interested agent would want me to become an Unhingement-themed influencer, like, yesterday, because we live in hell, and in hell every creative person needs to grow a sizable platform to sell their wares to the public.
When I wrote that first draft I was also riding the high of being able to focus for an extended period of time for the first time in my life.
The beginning of 2023 had me a bit skint, and I ended up taking on way too much freelance work that summer. I was so overwhelmed that a friend of mine gave me a snack-sized Ziploc baggie full of little orange pills and told me to give them a try. After three days of popping someone else’s Adderall dose in the morning, I felt a sense of relief that was definitely not normal. I finished the baggie, saw two of my projects through, quit the third one that was making me crazy, and kept the wonderful gig that is still paying my rent.
A psychiatrist with soulful eyes who only takes Venmo diagnosed me with ADHD that October, a few weeks before I turned 38. When he asked about my work history, I told him that this was the third time I had worked myself into the kind of burnout that required quitting my job in the past ten years. He looked gravely concerned, told me about masking, and said that I needed to figure out a way to stick to creative work so I could stop doing anything classified as “admin.” I heeded his advice, stopped producing projects remotely, reclaimed my energy, and poured it into my writing.
While I don’t think that a diagnosis would have felt very empowering in the first two decades of my life, being able to put a name to why I’ve always felt like certain things were harder for me after so many years of living in a world that’s not built for my brain has gifted me deep compassion for my inner child, which is why, even though it dulls my deranged sparkle, I feed her 10 mg of Adderall XR almost every morning. Doing that has changed my life so dramatically that when I think back on how chaotic I was in my twenties and a solid chunk of my thirties, I have to remind myself I wasn’t playing with the same deck of cards that I’m playing with now and it’s in my best interest, if I’m going to insist on revisiting the past, to be extraordinarily kind.
There was the time, in grad school, when I wrote a paper on how 9/11 changed American sitcoms, and it got me invited to join a panel at an academic conference in Austin that I didn’t attend because I was too nervous, didn’t know anyone going, and it takes a nonsensical, herculean effort for me to book a flight even though I love to travel. Then, there was the time, a few years back, when my dear friend Sheela and I were in line for the DÔEN sample sale in Beverly Hills and befriended the lovely women standing in front of us. One of them happened to be a literary manager married to one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood — she said she wanted to read my screenwriting and told me to keep in touch. I texted her, and she said she was going on vacation, but I should text her again in a few weeks. I lost my nerve and never sent her anything.
I don’t regret those missed opportunities because I know academia is very not for me and there are only about a dozen screenwriting jobs left in Hollywood. Even though I have brain damage from almost a decade and a half of making social media content, I’m grateful that I stuck with it so that I can at least keep getting paid until AI is ready to replace me. But I also can’t do this again — work hard, schmooze hard, and then, because I’m too anxious and in my head about it, not walk through the door that has magically opened.
At the end of last week, I saw my therapist. She let me bitch about all of this in monologue and when I finally paused she said, “it sounds like you’re having a neurotic conflict.”
“Is that a clinical term?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Neurotic conflict,” I repeated slowly, “it has good mouthfeel.”
She laughed, wrote something down (what she wrote, we’ll never know), and then said, “you really are funny.”
Well, yes, because all of this neurotic conflict needs somewhere to go. But when a licensed professional says that you’re experiencing something evoking Woody Allen, energetically, it’s probably time to get your shit together and figure out a way to chill.
And so I shall, because one thing that I noticed when I was doing my market research last year is that every book about how social media (and technology-at-large) is scrambling our brains (and making us less human) is either written by a pretentious cuck who has clearly never known the joyful fugue of smoking weed and scrolling TikTok, or a doctor who suggests, like, a month-long dopamine fast that would literally get me fired, or a self-serious theorist who thinks a return to bird watching is the answer when too many of us are so far gone we need to reclaim enough attention to watch an episode of TV.
To quote Toni Morrison, because hers are some of the most encouraging words on writing: “If there’s a book you want to read, and it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
And while there’s still a decent chance that writing this proposal, let alone the actual book, will lead me to the asylum, if you’ve read this far, at least I’m no longer alone in the process. We’re in this together now: me, you, my therapist, my neurotic conflict, and these weapons-grade vibes that are trying to kill all of us.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
P.S. On Tuesday, July 15 at 10am PT/1 pm ET I’m joining the fabulous
LIVE on Substack for her Wild Live series! I’ll remind you closer to, but letting you know now so that you don’t schedule a wretched Zoom meeting that could have been a daydream.A huge thank you to our mutual readers who asked Sarah to chat with me — writing may be my calling, but talking is my PASSION, and I ‘m so excited about this. 💖
CORRECTION: my mother just called and said I was actually one and a half.