"nursing my artistic wounds:" a q&a with paulina pinsky
on anxiety, addiction, recovery, & becoming your own "singing bowl"
hey there, nervous wrecks! i’m super excited to introduce a brand new series here on NW: a q&a series with other writers and creators engaging with anxiety and mental health in a myriad of ways. there are so many ways anxiety manifests, and only so many experiences i can speak about myself. and i’m so excited to keep bringing you new voices whenever i can.
all this is to say that i’m VERY excited to introduce my first guest: Paulina Pinsky, an author and educator whose work is equal parts candid and tender, hilarious and visceral.
i first encountered Paulina at a reading during grad school. literary readings can be…well, dull, and monotonous. but not Paulina. her willingness to bare her soul, on the page and in front of us all, with comedic flair and a confidence i admired from the jump, truly moved me. (also this is besides the point, but: she has an incredible sense of style that i am low-key jealous of.)
so of course, i’ve been reading her work for the past several years. and i definitely have followed along with her journey writing about addiction, sobriety, anxiety, and creativity on her substack, Newly Sober. i knew i wanted to hear her take on what anxiety looks and feels like in the throes of recovery. so please join me in welcoming Paulina to NW!
What does anxiety feel like in your body?
I feel a vice-like grip around my throat and my gut-- the sinking, "I'm In Trouble" feeling you got as a kid when you got caught doing something "bad" and someone tells your Dad. It's a tension that I can't will myself out of-- that I can't just move past. My thoughts race and I ruminate on something small, like something I said that no one remembers, and even feeling anxiety as all feels embarrassing (because when I feel this way, I am absolutely convinced by the singularity of this experience), but I also know that I can't hold the thoughts in. To leave anxiety-provoking thoughts un-attended in my head, unspoken, is to let them grow bigger and fester. I know that my anxiety is not rational, and so I force myself to talk it out-- detonate the bomb and let the shrapnel land. Take deep breaths-- remind myself that I've felt this way before and that it has passed.
What are you most anxious about these days? How do you cope with this anxiety?
I am incredibly anxious about people misinterpreting my intentions-- but more than that, I cannot handle the idea of people disliking my work (sigh... the writer's ego).
I started my newsletter "newly sober" because when I was first counting days, I could not find writing about early sobriety by people who were in early sobriety. I now realize that this is because when you are newly sober, your brain is mashed potatoes. Plus, no one wants to hear what a newly sober person has to say-- we are insufferable, unhinged, and insane. Alas, unsatisfied with reading memoirs about alcoholic recovery from 5+ years into recovery, I took to substack and started writing through my early sobriety.
I am an alcoholic stoner in recovery, and I used to be nervous about people not believing that marijuana is addictive. The rhetoric used to legalize marijuana has backfired so much so that people are convinced it's medicine (so rarely the case) and that it is good for you (it's a mind-altering substance, my friends). But I can't undo the work of billions of dollars invested by Big Marijuana. So now, I worry about more things that I cannot control.
I have spent the first two months of 2023 looking back on my first year sober, trying to figure out why I got sober and what minor shifts led to the major revelation: I need to get sober. I was engaged living in Brooklyn, and now I am not engaged living at home with my parents in Pasadena. I was a daily weed smoker, and now I am not.
*side note: marijuana may help with anxiety additionally-- but LET ME TELL YOU, FRIEND! That shit pours gasoline on the flame! It takes six months for THC to leave your system, and it will take about a year for your anxiety to fully abate*
Bi-monthly, I have been turning newsletters into podcast episodes, so as to further develop my work and spread awareness about marijuana addiction. However, this of course means I have to dive into difficult material about myself and others, more than I would like.
Last week, after releasing my newsletter, someone took it upon themselves to go to my father's website to write an essay about how "Disappointing" it is that I am exploiting my ex-fiance for profit and that by writing about him, I am keeping him from getting help. I can't help but ask myself, "What profit?" Is the $3,000 I've made over the last year (not nothing, of course) from my newsletter supposed to be enough to move out of my parents' house? And my ex tried to get sober, but inevitably told me it was "not for" him.
The vice-like grip and trouble feeling swooped in-- and I spent a good amount of time spiraling for a whole afternoon and evening.
It is painful that when I simply write what happened-- that even while writing with the intention of NOT causing harm and truly just dictating what happened as it did-- that someone on the internet will go out of their way to tell on me to my dad. Which I have never taken the time to write a note to someone's dad, telling them how "Disappointing" they are.
All of this is to say: I had to nurse myself back to health. That to stop writing because one stranger things I'm disappointing is to give them more power than they truly hold. I have to remind myself that this is what it means to be a modern writer-- to quote Salt & Pepa: "Opinions are like assholes/ and everybody's got one!" It's an important reminder that to lay myself bare isn't always going to afford me praise. That there will be someone who doesn't understand or identifies more with the person who caused me harm than with me. And that's just... life. And the internet.
And all I can do is recalibrate: decide whose opinion I value, and also figure out how to do better next time.
Writing is a compulsion-- I wish I could do something else. Like, do people's taxes. But I've always been bad at math.
So I cope with this anxiety by nursing my artistic wounds-- talking to people who understand my intent and mission. Reminding of artistic successes-- that I am capable of another. Baths and chocolate. Petting my cat.
This time though, I took a page from Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way", which I am currently leading thirty people through, and wrote a list of people whose opinion I care about-- it turns out the list is very short. Once I wrote that list, I was able to calm down and think constructively about the way in which I may have failed this reader. That I may have been thinking of the newsletters as building on each other, and should have added more of my current-day voice to the piece. And of course, it was a reminder that this is but the beginning of strangers transgressing boundaries and doing unhinged shit on the internet.
But that doesn't mean I will stop writing.
What is the funniest/most embarrassing instance of anxiety you’ve had (that you’re willing to admit to)?
When I was a sophomore in college, I was trying to open a plastic carton of milk. I was in my first serious depressive episode-- I was a year into eating disorder recovery, and sitting with the feelings that I once threw up left me feeling border-line catatonic. But this carton of milk had a pull tab-- and I pulled too hard, snapping the lil nub off. The carton remained sealed shut, and so I picked up my roommate's serrated knife, poked the tip into the plastic, shoved as if butchering meat and slipped and knicked my finger.
I looked at my finger, saw the way my skin separated-- and watched as the blood poured out.
Had it not been for my squeamishness about blood, I could have and probably would have been the third generation doctor in my family. But the sight of blood makes me queasy, and so I instantaneously felt like I needed to shit. I walked to the bathroom, pulled my pants down, and proceeded to shit my brains out. I grabbed toilet paper, wrapped it around my bleeding finger, and shoved my arm up into the sky-- keeping the wound above my heart, as my father taught me, to stop the bleeding.
While shitting my brains out with my arm in the air, I started to hyper-ventilate and felt like I was about to vomit.
At the age of twenty years old, this was the first time I had watched my own blood spill-- it was at that moment that I understood how profoundly fragile the human body is.
Fifteen minutes later I called my dad, told him the funny version-- about how I was shitting and hyper-ventilating with my bleeding finger over my head. Because of course, it was funny. But it was also very much reflective of a life-long coping mechanism of needing people to laugh at my pain. And laugh he did. He said, "That sounds like something the boys (my brothers) would do," laughed. And then said something like, "Welcome to adulthood." He couldn't understand how that was the first time I understood that blood comes out when you cut yourself.
But then again, neither can I. I'd bled before, obviously. But the process of it-- seeing the skin separate, and the split second before the blood came, unnerved me.
There is a calm before the storm.
Now, it is all very funny to me. But at the time? Terrifying.
If you could write your own list of anxiety-soothing affirmations, what would they be?
You are safe.
There is divine timing in everything.
You are never in control and you were never in control.
We can do hard things.
Sometimes just counting: one, two. one, two. one, two. A figure skater for thirteen years, this is how I'd get through my programs-- each stroke became a number, so as to keep "I can't" out of my head. Turning my thoughts into these two numbers has kept the panic from taking over for longer than I can remember.
Amidst a panic attack, I have gotten pretty good at self-soothing without medical intervention. I tend to try to take deep breaths and hum with my mouth closed. Something about the frequency of the vibration in my jaw and the reminder of my ability to make beautiful sounds is soothing-- I almost become my own singing bowl. And I do it until I can either take a bath or lay down in a warm bed and fall asleep.
Paulina Pinsky is a writer, artist, educator, and figure skater in Los Angeles. She writes an AMAZING substack called newly sober documenting her journey with early sobriety, plus she co-authored It Doesn’t Have to be Awkward: Dealing with Relationships, Sex, and Other Hard-to-Talk-About Stuff with her dad, Dr. Drew Pinsky. She offers writing coaching and online writing workshops, which you can learn more about on her website www.paulinapinsky.com. Follow her on IG and Twitter @ mizpiggy111.
