Happy being unhappy --

Though I wouldn't call myself an artist in any professional sense of the word, I am rather left-brained.  It would seem that often madness and emotional turmoil go hand in hand with a heightened imagination and deeper need to nurture the soul through creative endeavors.

Growing up, my father always played the Blues. 

Though he doesn't make as much music anymore, as a child I was constantly surrounded by musicians from his time touring before he met my mother.  We constructed a wall to block off the family room area and built a studio.  At one point I owned 11 basses, 1 upright bass, a mandolin, a bouzouki, a banjo, a harmonica, 2 keyboards and a host of smaller, eclectic instruments (as well as all my father's guitars).  

Also a night-owl like me, I remember my father awake until the wee hours of the morning listening to music through headphones turned up so loud that I could still hear the faint melody through my bedroom walls.  He was always so excited by the interest I had taken in making music.

I still make music every day.  I also draw, paint, record...perhaps the thing that draws me most, however, is my writing.  When I was younger, I wrote thousands of pages about the fantasy world I dreamt I lived in on my blue-rubber iBook.  I wrote so much that I had to get an external hard-drive - it's funny to think how computers have progressed over the past 15 years.  This world I visited each day inside my head was so real to me I have to wonder if, in some other reality, it was not.  Though I have abandoned my fantasy world for a more realistic, somewhat existentialist genre of writing, my words have never lost their importance in my life.

Now fast-forward to when I was 20 years old and...

I accidentally committed myself.

But that's another story entirely.  However, this is the one time in my life when I was prescribed psychopharmaceuticals.  For about a month, I took the medication as directed.  To be honest with you, yes, they did work.  I wasn't depressed anymore.  I didn't feel everything so desperately to the core of my being to the point of fearing myself.

But I didn't feel anything anymore.

I wasn't depressed.  I wasn't happy.  I wasn't excited.  I wasn't afraid.  I couldn't feel love.  And I could not love.  And this, to me, was just no way to live.  

I wasn't inspired anymore.  I didn't create anymore.  I felt no drive to release the bleeding color from my mind and onto paper.  I had no passion.  So I stopped taking them.  

What makes life worth livingis the fact that I feel everythingso deeply thatit sets fireto my soul --

It's hard for many people to understand, just as I'm sure it's easily understood by many others like me.  But I really am happy being unhappy.  And as hard as it sometimes is to survive, 

I wouldn't trade my depressionfor all the happiness in the world --

xLoJu