My mind (or, the loss of creativity)

It's come to my thoughts lately, that for years, I protected what I cherished most. My mind.

Even through painful and debilitating bouts of depression, I hesitated and often refrained from treatment so as to not scar or impair my ability to do what I love most, writing. And somehow, in the gaining control over the depression by avoiding that which causes it, I have also encapsulated every essence of what made me creative. I have become dull.

My fear of words has surfaced in the trying-to-find-myself period that we are currently in (more commonly referred to as fall). This is usually a time of re-build, re-focus, re-invention and creativity for me, and this year,  I'm just not feeling it. I have found that when I try to tap into these words - the way that colors and pictures and emotions could pour themselves into a line filled by rises and falls, how curves and paths of language used to dance and skip along the page for me - that I am instead trying to pull them weakly from behind the bars I have guarded them in with. This is so unnatural to me, this fear of expression. Why am I so afraid?

I suppose that in a way I am afraid of the emotions hidden beneath. In the last year I have cried more, laughed more, lost more and found more than I ever have in my life thus far. And yet, with most things, I feel nothing. I have surface attachment to things, even to people. I feel love as though it is a butterfly fluttering its wings softly against my skin but it never finds a place to land and take a few seconds respite. It flits near and far from me, depending on who or what is happening in my realm in that moment, and only in that moment. I feel sad moments much the same, tears one moment, numbness the next, as though I have no right to cry.

I suppose that I also feel that I am "too busy" to take the time anymore, to write, or to feel. It's exhausting, this task of creating ones soul on a page, all of the thoughts and emotions messy and the words taking on meanings and lives of their own ... knowing that likely no one but your own mind can understand, but praying that someone will, all the same. You give  birth to these words, this language, and then you set it free and watch it flounder in a world where everyone speaks French and it is fluent only in Greek.

I know most of my fear lies in reaching out to the emotions that writing requires. It means giving up control over the depression side of things and allowing the good, the bad, and the ugly to rear its wonderful impossible head again, and then trying to clean up the aftermath. I have seen those days, the darkness that causes shadows even in the bright sun, the tears that run rivers over lined paper, causing the blue ink to run like veins on marred skin. Un-caging these animals means letting all of them loose, for where you free one, you must free them all.

I fear the intensity that becomes me when I write. I no longer see the world as it is, but I create it as I want it to be. It wreaks havoc and instability into my life, causing chaos and the screeching cries for change that I don't know that I am young enough for, not to mention capable of,  following anymore. I have children, a job, responsibility that I have enough problems shouldering without the distraction of the dance of language.

Yet tonight, here I sit. I am writing. It beckons me, the words taunt me, daring me to pull them one by one, little by little and to let them breathe. It feels empowering somehow, freeing, and also has the feeling of playing with an entire case of zippo lighters while standing next to a gasoline tanker.

It makes me wonder just how often I can do this. How much can I write and feel and yet maintain control over the beast of depression? How much of my mind and my soul and my words can I bring to life before they take on a life of their own that smothers the one I need to have? Is the one that I think I need merely a misconception of perspective?

I suppose I feel that I am not at a point in my life, within my friends, that I can be the creative one. I have been overshadowed by artistic talent with vision that humbles me and intimidates my desire to put anything to paper, for how can I ever measure up to such a view. I am afraid of my words not being good enough... but good enough for whom? Is the fear that I feel enough to bind the words forever?

I know this -- without this part of me living and breathing, it kills the rest. I long for nights with a keyboard and a blank screen, begging me for patterns and texture, asking me to create it, to build it and make it everything in my mind - almost as much as I fear it. Maybe I haven't stopped protecting it after all.