Hypervigilance and Invasive Multi-Thinking

So far, the hardest part of completing a novel seems to be acknowledging that my own creative thoughts are important—and sometimes deserve to come first.

I find it difficult not to have my mind unwillingly entertaining five streams at once. Invaded. I need answers to a thirty-bullet-long list of questions about my book, my characters, the meanings and beginnings and endings of the story. To do that thinking, I need to block out other things—which, of course, makes me think of those other things. Like invasion.

The word invasion suggests an enemy, an external force sweeping over a field in masses or ambushing from behind a sunny little newsstand just as you ponder the headlines. What if the only thing standing between a person and a finished novel—or any other piece of art—is an imbalance in priority? Or a helmet.

My phone rings, but I never answer it. It’s been on silent since 2019. Whoever wants something finds a way to reach me anyway. Back then, it was always beside me on my desk or in my hand even—so why add the stress of more noise? Now it sits on a hallway shelf while I try to finish a second draft of a second novel.

A missed call often carries more weight than a received one. It lingers, calling me from the bookshelf. One more thing, one more person’s need to consider. Missed calls force me to confront the question of priority.

I chose this. I didn’t choose this. Both things are true. I didn’t choose to be this sensitive to everything around me—that was programmed long ago. Hypervigilance makes it hard to focus on one thing at a time. A beloved friend once explained monotasking to me. I want to do one thing—just one. But there’s someone in the kitchen. Or that missed call is perpetually bouncing off the walls.

A psychiatrist wrapped in apricot-colored cashmere once told me to stop building walls between myself and others. Perhaps accurate then, but not now. I need walls. With a powerful imagination and a bad case of compulsive help-people-out syndrome, every person, idea, or task sets off a snowball of associations. Each incoming one leads to at least one of three things:

1. I drop what I’m doing to focus on someone else’s needs.

2. I keep going but now juggle two or three trains of thought at once.

3. If it’s late in the week, I freeze and spiral into I-will-never-finish-anything mode.

I need more walls, not fewer.

Walls made me think of using walls for different purposes. Not just to keep people or rain out, but to keep complex, possibly magical strands of story in. In fiction writing, I was told to consider the chain of consequence. Steve Almond said in an interview that cause-and-effect logic should drive plotting. One thing leads to another, as in life. But in a story, you can lay out a train track of events—without the distraction of the entire world happening all around it. Which makes me think of trains, and of The Age of Magic by Ben Okri. A tempting thought for another time.

When I feel like I’m not getting enough done—that my thoughts have thinned into a thought-colored mist perfuming the freelance workspace I call the kitchen table—I often blame the world. The world of assignments, phone calls, invitations, inspiration, bills, banners, secondhand smoke, and home deliveries. But I know these people. I ordered most of those boxes. It’s on me to duck, to silence, to fend off the incomings.

Which leads me to obligations and the misconception that everyone expects everything at once. This may be obvious—and if it is, I’ll call you back real soon to congratulate you—but for now, my self-prompt is: Miss more calls, not fewer. Accept being the person who misses a birthday, misses a lunch, misses out—for the benefit of my precious novel idea. It will only live the life of a precious idea if treated as such.

Thinking about multi-thinking renders an image of my brain as antiquated accounting system running too many processes on a single core processor. And that image makes me feel like I need a break. But breaks make me think of failure which makes me think of myself as a kid, which is not the image I need when cultivating my dream of a singular literary work. See what I mean? I did it again.