The Myth of the Tortured Creative
Being mentally ill is no joke, y’all.
I’ve heard so many people buy into the idea that mental illness makes you creative. That somehow the pain and turmoil brings out your artistic side. You know, the people that say Van Gogh would have never painted Starry Night if it weren’t for the malady that put him in the asylum.
Plenty of offense - those people are full of shit.
I don’t hide the fact that I suffer from anxiety, PTSD, and treatment-resistant depression. I’ve been on every med under the sun. I’ve been hospitalized more times than I can count. And never - not once - has any of my illnesses inspired me to create. I create in spite of them. I create to fight them. But because of them? No way.
One of my greatest fears is losing who I am, and for me, part of that is losing the things I enjoy doing. Mental illness steals those away from me. When I’m in the midst of a depressive episode, the things I love are the first to go. Reading? Not when you can’t concentrate worth a damn. Writing doesn’t work when you think every word you produce is trash. I don’t watch much tv or play many video games, but those go too. Taking care of plants is impossible when you can’t even take care of yourself. Knitting and crochet? Why pick up a hook or needles when the world is a dumpster fire?
I’m in the middle of one of the worst depressive episodes of my life right now. It’s March 11th, 2022, and I can probably count the number of rows I’ve knitted or crocheted since the new year on two hands. (This makes it very hard to update on Instagram, by the way. Who wants the same picture of the same progress on the same shawl over and over again?) What started out as a well-deserved break from designing turned into an involuntary break from the hobby I love most in the world. I just… can’t make myself do it. And that terrifies me. Who am I if not a crafter?
Who am I?
I wish I had a good answer. If I did, it might lift me up out of this, or at least make it easier to jump the hurdles that are sitting in my way this winter.
I’m doing my best to claw my way back to recovery, doing everything I can to get back to the things I love, to get my life back to some semblance of normalcy. It takes time, and it takes compassion (which I have bucketfuls from others - I need it more from myself), and it takes hope (which, admittedly, is in short supply right now). I ask only for your patience and understanding.
(And for you to never again bring up Van Gogh to a mentally ill person. Because, let me remind you, he painted his best paintings not while he was sick, but while he was in recovery, while he was safe and cared for. We as humans thrive under those conditions, sick or not.)
