Is It Worth It?

I find that, as I begin to 'feel better', as my mood becomes 'normal', the need to write, to draw in order to express myself becomes less. That does not mean, however. that that need has completely disappeared. It is unfortunate, than, that while the need is still there my ability to express myself in those ways seems to have gone, or at least to have become much less apparent. The images are all but gone (happily, though, with the gradual disappearance of those useful images, those 'drawings' in my head waiting to be brought alive on paper, the other images that haunted me, of blood, razor blades, and suicide, have also become more and more infrequent), the words which seemed almost effortlessly to string themselves into poetry now only present themselves in a useless jumbled fashion. Even my ability to write a halfway decent blog entry has been severely diminished (as some of you have surely noticed).

These changes would not be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that I find myself still in need of those abilities, those ways of expressing myself. After all, they were, in some ways, my only means of expressing myself, of 'explaining' what went on inside this head of mine. Though my drawings and poetry may seem somewhat indirect (as indeed they often are) from there I was often able to explain things that would have otherwise remained locked inside the dark chasms of my mind, leaving me frustrated, tortured by these feelings, emotions, and experiences which I could not otherwise explain, not even to myself. Poems like 'My Child, My Beloved' (which came from my realization of exactly how far I had wandered from the One who cares the most for me) and 'The Choice' (written when I was moving ever closer to taking my own live, when there seemed nothing more to hold me on this celestial globe); drawings like 'Head/Heart'(illustrating what I believe is a disconnect between head knowledge and heart knowledge) and 'A Work In Progress' (a drawing for which the idea goes back, eight, nine, or 10 years, one that I cannot explain in words but instead must be felt by the viewer), these were the means by which I expressed myself, the ways in which I was able to best explain my experience, to myself as well as others. Without these I am left only with feelings and experiences that I cannot explain to others because I myself do not understand them.

It has been suggested that there is a link between creativity and mood disorders such as major depressive and bipolar disorders (). No surprise when we look at the lives of such people as Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sylvia Plath. Taking my own experience into account I, for one, am inclined to agree.

I wonder... is it worth it..?