Cures and Paintpots

Posted on April 5, 2004 in Depression Reading Writing

Alice W. Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease : The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain strikes me as a rare and esoteric balance of thinking and feeling. She dispenses no cures that you can work using a paper and notebook nor does she offer medicine as the final answer to our existential woes:

I know, and I presume most of the people who reading this book know, how much joy the feeling of creativity brings. It is 5:30 a.m. and I have already been typing long enough that my legs are numb, but this discomfort is many miles away. Most people come by their love of writing in a healthier way, but for me it was an illness that makes me associate writing with this joy that makes my heart race, yet at the same time makes my had quiet enough that I can hear vibrations in the ether.


The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.

I’m looking at my disease in a new way. Dostoevsky was unashamed of his epilepsy. I’m not about to stop taking my meds — the best writers Flaherty believes exist in the borderlands between mood disorder and what others call “sanity” — but when depression colors the room indigo, perhaps it isn’t such a bad idea to give the Beast a paintpot or two, let it splash its good goo around some.