Drain the poison

Bonnie Gillespie writes a brilliant column every week called The Actors Voice. It’s always excellent, but her post this week is especially brilliant. (I hadn’t yet looked at so my thanks go to Nancy Wolfson for pointing it out to me in an email today)

They key thought?

I spent years in friendships that served the friendships and not the individuals. We could actually feed off each other’s negativity and live forever. And all we’d have at the end of any bitch session was a righteous feeling of, “Yeah! The world sucks! Screw ‘The Man’! Let’s show ’em!” But when you are so sure the world sucks, owes you something, or needs to be put in its place, how much creative energy does it take to overcome that stacked deck in order to actually create even a tiny bit of light? In comparison, when you weed out the Poison Playmates, you find you’re filled with extra creative energy, you have more enthusiasm for creating your own projects, and you suddenly have an astonishingly abundant source of free time (because you’re not sitting around grousing about how hard it’s gonna be to actually do it).

That paragraph is good, but believe me, for this column you want to read the whole thing.

(Edited to correct typos and clarify point.)