Blogging about my upcoming skits deadline did the trick yesterday, along with talking with my friends at Denny’s, and I now have the clarity and confidence to go ahead with some skits.

I feel like every artist has these periods of self doubt and difficulty. Art is hard. In order for it to be worth a damn, you have to be expressing from deep inside you in your art. Rules and formulas are never enough. You need to find what you need to express, and express it.

And that involves deliberately (if not necessarily consciously) far, far deeper into yourself than most people will ever go… and that’s the way they like it. That’s why art skews towards the introverts who have no problem sitting alone and thinking about stuff because by doing so they create their own stimulation.

Especially writers, of course.

So it’s no surprise that, while rummaging through our outsized closets stuff with unpressed thoughts, sometimes we open up some stuff that is going to take some time and effort to process, and that means that, during that period, we have even less resources than usual for things like self-confidence, mood, and creativity.

And until we process all that, we lose contact with our muse and if we suffer from the disease known as depression, that leads to a crisis of art where we doubt whether we are talented at all and feel like everything we have ever done is so bad we cringe at the thought that we ever let anyone see it, including ourselves.

I suppose what makes someone an artist for real as apposed to an artist in potentia is whether you get over that or not. A lot of people don’t. They reach their first speed bump and realize that they are going to have to really push themselves to get over it, so they decide that the speed bump is really an insurmountable wall a thousand feet high and ten feet thick, and that getting over or through it would literally be impossible.

No matter how absurd a notion that is. I know this, because I have been there. I have had to face those awful moments when someone asks why you can’t do something that is so obviously the right thing to do, and you have no answer. You just know that you can’t. You can’t explain why.

That’s why a major milestone of my recovery was the realization that not knowing was okay. That it was permitted. That might seem like the wrong answer because it seems, on the surface, to be pro-depression, but it really isn’t. Anything that opens the door for self-forgiveness destroys depression. And once I forgave myself for not knowing, that freed up my mind to concentrate on what was going on that was keeping me from doing stuff, and removing the blockages one by one.

Then you reach that final door, and you have to ask yourself, do I really want to leave? And when you realize that the answer is “no”, you have to ask yourself why. What is outside that door that scares you? Because for me, it was no mere reluctance. It was stark unreasoning animal level terror and dread. The kind of fear that requires no specific object, nor does it require a specific negative outcome to be in mind. It is the root fear that is behind a lot of our compulsions and fears. The feeling that if you do X, or fail to do X, Something Terrible Will Happen. Something so terrible that your mind refuses to imagine it. It’s just…. Something.

And the really tricky bit is that when you realize that you don’t actually want to leave your personal Labyrinth of Misery, you have to also face that you built the Labyrinth you have been telling yourself you hate for so long, and that it served a purpose, which was to distance and protect you from the world Out There.

That’s what happens when you withdraw into your own mind in order to protect yourself. You forget you did it, and start to think that your Labyrinth is reality, therefore reality sucks. After all, you can’t see your way out of it (by design), so there must be no way out. Right?

Even though that’s like saying that if you can’t see Paris, it must not exist.

The good news is that it’s your Labyrinth and therefore you can dismantle it now that it has outlived its purpose. It’s not easy – you WILL need therapy in order to shed your emotional baggage – but it can be done. And it can be done gradually – it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing if you don’t want it to be. You can do a little when you have the energy, and then stop. You can do it in baby steps. Depression loves to make you feel like you have to climb the entire mountain in one go or it’s impossible.

But it’s not true. You can climb a little and rest. Climb a little more, rest some more. You lose no progress by stopping. Don’t believe depression’s lies. You can do it.

The great thing is that the more recovery you push yourself through, the easier it gets, because every emotion defrosted and released frees up more of your mind for pushing you through the rest. It’s a self-perpetuating process by that point. All you have to do is crank the handle and the machine does the rest.

And it still doesn’t matter how many times you stop and rest.

I do miss my weekly therapy sessions. I should look into the counseling options at VFS. It would be no big deal for me to go to counseling during lunch, or during periods I have off, or after school. It would be a hell of a lot easier than getting back to Richmond then taking the bus then having to walk from the bus stop to the office. Then another walk + bus to get home.

Recovery is a lot faster when you have someone to talk to about stuff. Someone who will ask you the questions that bring the catharsis.

It’s like emotional Ex-Lax. It might not be fun will it’s working, but afterwards you will feel SO MUCH BETTER.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.