A Fine Line

I haven't written about my mental state of late, and now I feel it is necessary to put it out in the open a bit. What I had been feeling lately was a bit of writer's block; you may have noticed I haven't been as brilliantly stimulating as some of my earlier posts were.

For the past few months I've been on a new med that has helped immensely in my dealings with "freaking out" at the least little thing that would otherwise have upset me - like being on call with too many calls in my queue. The new med has simply not let me get that way. Take, for example, a recent weekend where I spent eight hours working on one [expletive deleted] that was eating me alive. I kept my cool for the most part - something that would have left me simmering in a puddle of goo had I not been on this med. Or that's what I think.

But, as I found out just now, I've been experiencing a side effect that I'd considered, but wasn't sure of - the new med has affected my creativity. You may have noticed.

As I had considered that the med was affecting me negatively, and that a recent refill was to blame, I set out to find if, in fact the prescription was filled wrong - it wasn't. But since I was on that subject, I did a simple Google search: anxiety and creativity. From Google, "About 5,350,000 results". Guess I'm not the only one interested in this topic.

Information galore, folks. One such search result goes thusly: In his book "Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity," Dr. Stephen Diamond, ...a clinical and forensic psychologist, works with many talented individuals committed to becoming more creative. "Creativity," he states, " is one of humankind's healthiest inclinations, one of our greatest attributes."

Further, Diamond holds that creativity may be a powerful and often dark endeavor: "The more conflict, the more rage, the more anxiety there is, the more the inner necessity to create. We must also bear in mind that gifted individuals, those with a genius (incidentally, genius was the Latin word for daimon, the basis of the daimonic concept) for certain things, feel this inner necessity even more intensely, and in some respects experience and give voice not only to their own demons but the collective daimonic as well."

[Above are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Diamond in The Psychology of Creativity from TalentDevelop.com]

From that, it would appear, if one removes anxiety from the equation, creativity suffers.

I'm suffering - I think a doctor's appointment is in the offing.