When we think about writers, we think about the greats; Mark Twain, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway. All amazing writers with more than just talent in common….they all had depression.
I mean, think about it, throughout all of history it seems the people that are remembered are the ones who burn out… not fade away. And in case you didn’t get my reference, these are Kurt Cobain’s famous last words; a man with incredible artistic talents, who met a bitter and self-induced end.
When looking into the link between depression and writing, I stumbled upon an interesting study done by Swedish researchers. Published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, they point to a connection between creativity and mental illness, indicting that something about the life of a writer puts him/her at a higher risk of depression and or suicide, than that of their relatives. Everydayhealth.com suggests “The writing life is of necessity isolated, stressful, and full of rumination over the mystery of human behavior, as famous writers' life stories illustrate.”
And as a writer myself, I have a problem with this.
Throughout my whole life, I’ve always believed if I wanted to be a great writer I had to be sad. I pictured myself hiding away in a small studio apartment, writing best-selling novels, with a broken heart and a gun to my head.
But being the perpetually optimistic person I am, I struggled with this idea time and time again. Constantly on the fence about what I was supposed to be feeling and what was actually going on inside me; eventually leading me to stop writing all together. Then something weird happened.
Without writing, I felt a void in my life. Not realizing the impact that writing every day truly had been having on my well-being. Not being able to write things out, to get it all out, was driving me to the point of insanity. Leading my life to the point of sadness I had so desperately wanted to achieve as a writer.
So I began writing again, this time with a different mentality.I stopped looking for painful things to write about, stopped purposely trying to get my heart broken… which is a lot harder than you think, and stopped trying to imitate the greats that had come before me.
I decided to try a new kind of writing, one that involved spontaneous chaos; fully trying on the idea, for lack of a better phrase, that you only live once. Leading my life to become a series of impulsive decisions, with people I barely knew and nights I wouldn’t trade for the world. I started talking to people I wouldn’t normally, doing things I wouldn’t normally; learning more about the world and more about myself through chaos and contradictions. Every little mistake became research, giving me amazing stories to tell, and more inspiration than I knew what to do with.
As much as I admire Ernest Hemingway, I don’t necessarily believe in his methods, but I find his quote, “The writing is the only progress you make,” to be one of my favorites. Maybe he was talking about his depression, but that’s not how I see it. No matter the method or the way I choose to live my life as a writer, the writing is still the only progress I can make. So even if all sad people write, I refuse to believe that all writers have to be sad. Because I'm not stopping, and I'm not burning out anytime soon.
