I am in a dark, dreary, place soaking in melancholy.
And, I LOVE it!
The part of my brain that has an ounce of intellect left recognizes this “feeling”. My old FAMILIAR: the “dark side” of my Muse.
In her ground breaking work, “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and The Artistic Temperament“, author and manic-depressive, Kay Redfield Jamison suggests the artist who suffers from mood swings needs her depressions to ground, to make real, to solidify her ideas and creations.
And, what artist, what writer, what sculptor, what painter: in fact what anyone who creates DOES NOT suffer swings of mood?
Just yesterday I was coaching a 20-something asipiring muscian/song writer who conjectured, “maybe I’m bipolar?”
I do have Biploar Affective Disorder: specifically Bipolar II. I have extremely labile moods. I can zip from “feeling groovy” to “soaking in sadness” in under 2 minutes!
But, hey that’s me.
Yet, I hear many of my creative clients questioning whether they too have BPD. Almost as often as they ponder whether they have ADD or ADHD.
I’m not a psychiatrist, and I don’t play one on TV, but I do know moods and what it’ s like to have a scattered mind.
I believe that many, maybe even any one, whose reason for being is the expression of ideas will suffer from symptoms that mimic BPD, ADD, OCD, and ADHD.
I believe the ‘artistic or creative’ brain is wired differently.
Years ago, a friend and colleague, suggested that her brain was like a “tangled ball of string.”
I think the creative brain, the artistic brain does indeed resemble a ball of string. But, I think it’s much more like a huge network. In fact, in her memoirs, Jamison described her brain as dendritic.
I LIKE that term!
When I picture my brain as dendritic I see that massive collective of interconnected neurons, ideas zipping from place to place, briefly lighting the pathways, stirring the soul, firing the emotions!
As I said the other day to my wife when she asked “why are you so emotional, so down? Why are you so bothered by (what to her are unconnected) events?”
I spontaneously replied, “Because everything is connected to everything else!”
As I’ve pondered that idea, I have come to realize that in fact, EVERY IDEA, every memory, every ‘feeling’ in my brain does seem to be connected to every other entity — past, present, or future.
So, when as now, I am subjected to demands, to stressors, when 1 part of my brain is pinged, the rest thrums!
When events lead me to ponder, to muse about a past event, a former emotion, why then the rest of my neural net takes up that ‘feeling’.
So, as I ponder, and try to make sense of the shit that happened to me as a child, the whys and wherefors of child abuse, and fucked up families, it makes complete sense that those old, reeking, negative emotions would percolate and enfuse the entire network. And, as they do my being would move from lightness into the dark.
The dark is a familiar sanctuary. A place I reatreat into to hide and heal.
And, to play with the notion of ending it all, of taking those sharpened blades and ripping open my flesh so that my body could experience the depths of pain my mind and soul feel.
But, I will not act. For in reality I do not yet wish to pass on. I do not wish to die. It just feels that way.
And, so metaphorically, I take out the razor blades and imagine their caress.
(Crud. Is this dark or what?)
