Eleven years of blogging? If I knew now what I knew then, I’d probably do it anyway.
A month and a half ago, Ken Levine wrote a post called The link between successful writers and mental illness. Yes, there is one.
Andreas Fink at the University of Graz in Austria… found a relationship between the ability to dream up ideas and the inability to turn off that function in the brain that is always thinking…
We writers are constantly making associations between external events and internal memories. Make it stop!
Another study claimed successful individuals were eight times more likely as “regular” people to suffer from a serious depressive illness…
Lots of successful scribes have battled with extreme depression. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Dickinson, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill – just pick any writer Woody Allen reveres.
The theory as to why there is rampant depression is the following: We think a lot, we’re often isolated, and we tend to be narcissists. And that’s for the good writers. Imagine how much worse it is for [crappy] writers.
I don’t know that I’m a good writer. I DO know that I suffer that function in the brain whereby, even in sleep, my mind is processing what I want to write. And when it’s the case that I don’t have time to do so, the brain, the mood, the temperament gets…skewed.
I have long suggested that blogging, for me, is some sort of therapy. You all are my public shrink. Well, maybe not, in as much as I started writing before anyone was looking. Perhaps you’re all part of my group therapy session?
Maybe seven times this past year, I reposted older material, including three of the four Black Comic Book posts (one’s still to come) that were SEVEN posts when I first wrote them. I imagine this year will be the same use of older material, more or less. When I hinted at doing this a couple years ago, a few of you feared that it would be too familiar. I trust that I’ve allayed that particular fear.
As you know, I often write ahead in my blog, but, because of annoying things, such as LIFE, the number of posts in the queue is down significantly, 36% from the peak. This means that one of these days, I’m going to wake up, realize I have no post prepared, and will scurry around looking for a picture of one of my cats.
In any case, today represents my 4,019th consecutive day of blogging, which surely PROVES a certain mental illness. I plan to continue to “lie on the couch” for at least another year.