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

Always been crazy --

Throughout my childhood, I suffered silently through feelings of self-hate, paranoia, and the fear of disappointing my family.  Although I performed well in school - performed being the operative word - I was never truly happy.

My fear of doing "something wrong" stopped me from truly experiencing the life I was, at the time, blessed to live.  My childhood passed me by without any meaningful friendships - or, for that matter, really any friendships at all.  At an age where I should have had innocent relationships with my peers in order to understand myself and really blossom into the person I would have become, I studied hard, had manners, and always did the right thing.

But I was fat.

And this was always held above my head as the ultimate failure.  My wealthy relatives on my father's side insisted that my mother had "made me fat" out of spite to embarrass them amongst their friends in high society.  My father asked, although out of concern for my health, whether I did not want to sit in a chair without taking up the whole thing.  And my mother continued to feed me.

Ironically enough, I was never really bullied in school or made embarrassed because of my weight.  I mean, not that I was not an outcast - believe me when I tell you I was - however it was because of the fact that I was, rather, mentally and emotionally different from my peers.  Irony comes into play because what did make me feel bad about my weight was those same wealthy relatives asking me "if I even cared" about the fact that I would be bullied at school.  

Early on I realized that there was something 

going on with me that was not quite right.

For some time I believed it was just part of growing up.  But this faded quickly as my friends moved through the passes of puberty, making mistakes, and experimenting all the while coming out on the other side unscathed.  I did nothing for fear of the consequences.

Each emotion hit me like a ton of bricks.  I hated myself.  I was a failure.  I was fat.  I was ugly.  I sliced my fears into my skin.  I didn't understand.

But I was perceptive enough to know I needed help - so I asked for it.  Although I wasn't taken seriously by my family - you're healthy, you have enough money, you have everything you could ever want and more - they eventually gave in around age 14 and let me see a therapist.

That lasted about three sessions.  My mother, also being emotionally unstable (I hear these things run in families), fed what information she saw fit to my doctor.  My doctor never seemed to remember my name, what grade I was in, or much of anything we talked about - at, I'm sure, hundreds of dollars an hour.  The one thing she did seem to remember, however, was that she was convinced that I was

pretending to have multiple personalities.

This will have had something to do with the fact that I told her I blacked out and found myself 12 miles away from home on the doorstep of the one woman I knew whom took the time to accept me.  And something about the fact that I might be "slightly depressed."

Whether I was taken out of therapy or stopped going, I can't recall as is the case with much of that period of my life.  What I do remember, however, and what has remained the same to this day is my family's belief that I don't need help, and that I'm only really suffering because "I'm just too smart."  

Well, I think if that were true, now 11 years later, I would have somehow found a way out of this mess.

One day I will.  As it is now, I am (almost) 5 years married to the love of my life.  They say that opposites attract.  Well, not in our case:

I think when you're nuts you exude some sort 

of energy that attracts others

exactly like you.

From my husband, my family, and even down to the few people I am fortunate enough to consider true friends, they are all completely out of their minds.  Every last one of them.  And I say this with love.

This journal will be comprised of my thoughts and anecdotes as I try to understand what's wrong with me, what's wrong with my husband, and what's wrong with our relationship--

xLoJu