#74: The Usual Lights

When the solution to the troublesome verse appears suddenly while standing at the sink, when an idea appears just before sleep takes over and I have to turn the light back on—this is what it looks like when creativity is going well. When things are clicking this way, the end result doesn’t matter. Almost. With any luck, it will matter later.

But right now it’s enough just to finish rinsing the plate, to place it in the rack and go running off down the hall in search of paper and pen. This is creative happiness. Anyone who has ever made anything will recognize it, whether it’s a song, a book, a strawberry rhubarb pie, a painting or a house. It’s the happiness of tinkering, drawing upon experience and skill, applying what you know, and imagining a result. For some it’s a kind of high.

But synapses can only fire so much. Actually I don’t really know how synapses work. So let’s just take that statement as a metaphor. My point is, in my case there inevitably would come a moment when the clicking would stop, when the troublesome verse remained troublesome no matter how many times I’d go back to rinse that dish. A few days of inactivity turn into a week, then two, then a full blown dry patch. What goes up must come down.

In my case, that high was too high. And the crash was awful. It felt like falling out of being a person. That might sound overly dramatic, but I assure you that’s exactly how it felt. I turned to wine and whiskey to help break the fall. Meanwhile, thanks (or no thanks) to the mythology of creativity and intoxication, I thought alcohol also held out the possibility of inspiration. It did not. Nor did it help with being a person, or with anything else.

What I know now is that I was engaging in a more specific kind of self-medication: an attempt to smooth out the peaks and valleys not just of creativity, but of bipolar disorder (II), for which I’ve been receiving compassionate, expert treatment for some time.

Speaking about this is not something I’m comfortable with. It’s not so much shame or queasiness about over-sharing as it is a fear that from now on I’ll be seen through a filter, placed in a box. But I suppose that’s inevitable to some extent. We all view each other based on what we know, or think we know. That’s how it goes. Now you know. And it’s worth it if one person finds out from reading this that there are good treatments available, that suffering is not inevitable, and that talking about it with other humans is possible.

As I’ve been writing the day has gone from bright afternoon to dusk to a cold, Southern Hemisphere night. Just now, looking up from the computer screen, I see the apartment is completely dark. I’m off to make the rounds, turning on the usual lights.