Writing is Damn Difficult

Writing is damn difficult and anyone that tells you its easy has never written anything worth reading! Luckily, I enjoy reading my writing. I didn't write this for you, I wrote this for me. I write to humor myself and I’m easily amused. 

Writing is a solitary process. No one else can be involved and I have no problem with being alone. If I'm going to spend time with somebody I can't think of anybody I'd rather spend time with than myself. The most important relationship you have in this life is the relationship you have with yourself. You will be living with you for the rest of your life and wherever you go, there you are.  

JC AUER is the author of the book, ”You Be Normal and I’ll Be Me.”

When you live alone you live in your head, and that's why the madness begins. There's no loneliness like being alone in your own head. It's a loneliness that breaks your spirit and steals your will to live. It can kill you or make you wish you were dead. 

“Mental Anguish,” who thought this was a good idea? Who? You think God was creating the universe when he thought to himself,  "The earth must have air, water, toasters and mental anguish. Yes! Yes, must remember to put ‘mental anguish’ into the universe!” 

I have bipolar disorder and I’ll have it for the rest of my life. I was born this way. I didn't ask for this illness anymore than someone would ask for cancer or diabetes or any one of the myriad of medical conditions from which people suffer every day. 

Because of my mental illness I experience occasional periods of depression. Sometimes it's just a mild depression and then sometimes it's a deep, dark, dangerous and debilitating depression.

Clinical Depression can take you into a hell that words are incapable of describing, a place so dark and painful you pray death will come and end your suffering. For many suicide is the only way to stop the madness. Up to one in five of us will die by our own hands and half of us will attempt (source).

There’s nothing quite so depressing as wakening up and finding the other side of the bed empty. Realizing you're alone, depressed and there isn't anything you'd like to do today. You've lost all interest in your life other than your interest in it being over. Kind of sucks. 

I’d wake up disappointed I woke up at all. I’d much rather be asleep than awake and aware of my life. Sleep helped my life to go by without me actually having to participate in it.  

But then one morning I awoke to realize my family, friends, coworkers and lovers were all gone from me. They’d moved on to live their lives but I was still where I'd always been. Trapped within my mind. 

There is no cure for my mental illness but there is treatment and luckily I’m receiving the healthcare I need. I have a psychiatrist and a therapist who through hard work, dedication and medication have saved me from myself. I can now see a light at the end of the kaleidoscope.

Millions of people suffer from depression and the saddest thing is they suffer alone. They suffer alone because they are afraid to let anyone know they suffer. They isolate themselves to hide their condition because of the stigma attached to mental illness. They suffer alone and my heart goes out to each and every one of them.  

But as for me; I have embraced the madness. I am not my disease, it’s just a part of who I am. So deal with it! 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Hans Christian Andersen,  Graham Greene, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Mary Shelley, Louis Stevenson, Eugene  O’Neill, and a shit load of other authors all suffered from depression. Jack London, David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, William Inge, Malcolm Lowery, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide. 

But as for me, I have embraced the madness. I believe my mental illness is a source of my creativity. Perhaps it's the main reason I’m able to write, or perhaps I'm just crazy enough to believe it is.

As a writer I'm no longer considered “crazy,” now I’m,“ creative!” If I don't feel creative, I don't have to work! Now that I’m a writer I can surf porn whenever I like and I can work in my underwear if I don’t feel like getting dressed. There's no drug testing and I don't have to share a toilet with coworkers. Now that I’m a writer I can scream and throw shit in the middle of the night and the neighbors no longer call the cops.