I love to write, and I feel like everyday I come up with one or two ideas that I think would make a good story. The problem is I also struggle with depression and anxiety, horrid demons that rob me of motivation to do anything, even the things that I love. And even when I find the motivation, my depression often convinces me it is absolute rubbish at some point. This is why my hard-drive is full of dozens of writings that almost always end somewhere between pages 10 and 50, when my depression convinces me that I am deluding myself into believing that I can write and so I abandon the work.
I would like to think I am a fairly creative person. Or at the very least that I have an active imagination. Frankly, I’m not really sure what the difference between those two things are, but that is besides the point. The hardship for me is that I have all these ideas that mental illness traps in my head with it, and after a while my head gets to be quite noisy.
And this noise feeds the darkness that comes from my mental illnesses, further frustrating me and shrouding my creativity. Dealing with it is exhausting, and makes me wish I could just siphon off my thoughts into a pensive, as Dumbledore tended to do in the Harry Potter books.
There are many terrible aspects of fighting the demons of mental illness. In the grand scheme of things, having a hard time finding the motivation to write might not seem like that big of a deal. Yet, it is its own form of self-care, and mental illnesses’ ability to disrupt your ability to take care of yourself is absolutely a big deal. That is one of the reasons I post so regularly on this site, to force myself to do something I enjoy, to banish the demons by following through with self-care in spite of them. Maybe someday my bursts of creative light will be unbounded by the darkness of mental illness, but for now, each word, each sentence, each paragraph represents a small victory over mental illness. And that is something.
The Dark Tales Project 