It's Been a Long Time, Now I'm Coming Back Home

It's not that I haven't had time to draft the handwritten interview with Once. I just haven't done it. There are many things I haven't done that I need to do. There are many reasons for this. Blocks chief among them. Certain characters stealing center stage being another. And the fact that this little birdie ain't right in the head right now. But I'll be working on that. The thing about that is that I don't think I'll ever be totally normal. I know my brain's a strange thing. I know that I'll always be the strange bird, but there's no reason a strange bird has to be unwell. I don't know if this means meds. I haven't had my first session yet. We'll just have to see.

One of the things that has always worried me about getting counseling and using anti depressants or anti anxiety meds is that my creative cycles are pretty much hermetically sealed to my emotional cycles. I don't think that taking something like Lexapro would render me unable to create, but I wonder how easy it will be. I don't create well when depressed. Depression typically grows around a block and becomes a block. It's the upswing, the manic phase of my cycle, where the work gets done. I've always worried that balancing this tightrope act of emotions won't be exactly condusive to the way I create. Meaning that the depression won't dredge up the ideas and the manic won't be energetic enough for the work. Do you have to be unbalanced to be creative?

Some of our greatest writers and artists have been, for lack of a better phrase, fucking nuts. Poe, Van Gogh, Hemmingway, Plath. To name a few. And there are other who seem remarkably stable and normal, like Gaiman or Rowling. I'm pretty sure that all creative types are odd in some way. We see, hear or feel things that other people can't. This is why we create. But what's the difference between those brilliant unbalanced artists and the "normal" ones? I wouldn't buy that better art comes from the nutcases. Good, better and best are all subjective terms when it comes to art and literature. Do we want to measure it by success then? The crazies tend to be more successful after death. It's society's morbid fascination with things like that. They say oh, this writer committed suicide in a truly bizarre and sick way; let's read all her books now to find out why! It strikes me as odd and unfair that this happens. A good enough writer should be able to have success in life. But I'm just rambling here, not making any points that can be scientifically supported, just general observations on the way back up from a low point that's been very low indeed. When I have to say to someone that I don't feel I've been myself lately, something's wrong. All my friends who hit age 30 before me warned me that the warranty would run out, that biological breakdown would begin. For me, it's not my body that seems to be breaking. And it's not worrying about getting older on my part. I could care less how old I am. It's not something I have control over. But bodies change as they age. Brain chemicals, hormones, all that changes and can affect not just the body but the mind as well. My mother, in her 50s now and dealing with menopause, is a perfect example of how all this crap is connected.

There isn't anything I can do but wait and see. I don't expect to be told that, after one session with a therapist, I need to be medicated. It'll take time for her to reach that conclusion, but by then, I'll have a better understanding of where I stand in the mental health department, which is likely at the front of the line for the not-quite-insane-but-damn-close.

When it comes to blues music, my husband likes to say that a blues singer oughta be unhappy because it's not blues if it's happy. He likes to extend this to all creative work. I wonder how much truth is in it.

This is not what I meant to go on about, but there it is. We'll just have to wait and see.