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I have been pondering my own creativity and how it relates to the void within.

This might be one of the reasons creativity is linked to mental illness, because it seems to me like a lot of my ability to think the big thoughts and write the big plots is that within me, there’s is an enormous open space where the big ideas, the deep insights, and other mentally large things can go to be worked on, studied, analyzed, and ultimately integrated. If they make it that far.

But that great space within me is also the soul of my depression. I have often visualized depression as a kind of black hole that consumes the depressed person’s energy and from which no light can escape. A hungering void that coldly rejoices in annihilation of things like hope, motivation, pleasure, happiness, and joy in living.

I experienced it myself quite recently. It did not take long for the ego boost from the praise I got for my script recently to be destroyed by the void within. Couldn’t have taken more than a couple of hours for my depression to sink its teeth into my good feeling about myself and my talents and suck it dry.

“She wasn’t sincere. ” said my depression. “She says that to everyone. She was just trying to encourage us at a time when a lot of us will need it. Who knows what she really thinks? Even her story about living on Summerside was probably a lie. Her words mean less than nothing. ”

Well, so much for THAT. I have never had a better look into what impostor syndrome is like from the inside. I have always intuitively understood how someone can be at the top of their field and “have it all” and still not be happy. But I had never experienced it within myself so clearly as when I watched it in action, so to speak, over the last few days.

So it’s as though the void giveth with one hand and taketh with the other. It gives me (or at least enables) my gifts, and then takes away the joy I might get from the world because of them. It makes my magic possible but also drains me of the will to wield it. It gives me the warmth of my soul, but makes me incapable of feeling it unless it is reflected in another.

It’s quit maddening, as you can imagine.

And the thing is, I know what my depression is. It’s a malfunction in my neurotransmitters. Not enough serotonin doing its job. And a reward center of the brain that has become numb and unresponsive as a result. The void has a form and that form is serotonin starvation.

I am not sure that I am better off understanding this. I am, as you all know, soothed my information and understanding. It’s unknowns and uncertainties that drive me crazy with anxiety and panic. They eat away at my sanity like boiling acid. Any kind of information is welcome, even if the news is bad, because at least then I know something and can grapple with it mentally.

So on that front, I am probably better off understanding what my depression is in a literal sense. But on the emotional front, maybe not so much.

Because it makes it seem like it’s futile to try to resist it. The serotonin response simply is not there. What can you do against something so blankly simple? Not enough X. It’s not like I can just will my serotonin department to shape up or ship out. What’s the good of all this mentation if the chemical problem is still there?

But that’s where things really get interesting, because therapy works. I am far stronger and more whole than I was three years ago. That nasty old void is much, much smaller than it used to be. I would not exactly say that it’s thinking that did the trick, because the real key was with the heart and soul and not the mind, so it’s not like my recovery was due to a process of reasoning.

Every crazy person who knows they are crazy know the things that they think are not logically sound and often don’t make a goddamned bit of sense, involves entirely unsupportable leaps of logic and the total denial of all evidence, and are, in general, gobsmackingly wrong.

In other words, they are crazy things to think. But we are stuck with them. That’s a decent definition of insanity. Maybe people don’t resist the crazy thoughts at all and more or less accept them as reality. That’s not to say these people are stupid, weak, or easily deluded.

It’s just that eventually, you run out of the will to resist these very insistent and irrational thoughts.

But I have covered the futility of trying to think yourself sane before.

And while my depression might try to convince me that if I become more sane, I will lose all that precious hangar space and hence my special abilities, but I know that is not true. They are not one and the same after all. The saner I get, the smarter I get, and the better I am at doing my thing. The depression might, on some level, be part of the cause for my being so gosh darn smart and creative and whatever, but right now, it is only getting in the way.

Slowly but inexorably, the bulldozer of recovery in my mind pushes the garbage of my depression into the void of forgetting. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but the metaphor still fits. Hopefully I can continue to knit myself back together after so many years of being so very insane.

Every day, I struggle against the crazy thoughts and the feelings they provoke… or possibly vice versa. It’s a matter both of cognitive correction and striving toward the light – reason and spirit working together. And so far, it’s working.

There’s a long path ahead of me… and an even longer one behind me.

I will get there one step at a time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.