To Our Inner Struggles
I am a writer.
And I am not an alcoholic manic depressive.
I say that because I am thinking about the long list of those exceptionally gifted and talented writers, poets, artists and creative luminaries who dazzled the world with their writings and breathtaking works of art but often ended up taking their own lives – pretty ruthlessly at times. Virginia Woolf drowned herself with rocks in her pockets, Ernest Hemingway put a bullet in his own head, Sylvia Plath poisoned herself with the deadly carbon monoxide, the dejected, depressed old writer Norman Mailer once said:
“Each one of my books has killed me a little more.”
It is heartbreaking to the point of being painful to imagine a person with a talent so profound, wit so sharp and mind so creative to give way to depression, anxiety or abnormally huge intake of gin for that matter.
As I write this, I see before me the kind, laughing face of the turbulent comic genius, Robin Williams. I see him as Sean Maguire the kind, thoughtful psychologist with a warm generosity of heart, as Philip Brainard – the clumsy old professor who makes you breathless with laughter, as Peter Pan with that ever so wonderful smile, as Dr. Kosevich, Hunter ‘Patch’ Adams, Popeye and those countless characters he played to prove that he was a man with a gift of laughter and wisdom that comes naturally. It is said that Robin was once asked by a German journalist that why did the Germans have a reputation for humorlessness. Good, old Williams replied with a hearty laugh,
“Because you killed all the funny people.”
It was not unbelievable that a man like Williams took his own life for there is a long grim death count in history citing suicides of several creative geniuses just like him. However it’s undeniably sad and painfully disturbing.
And it makes me wonder. Why do writers, poets and people who let their imagination run wild in the enchanting fields of fantasy, fiction and dreams end up having such a poor mental health?
Why do these people have a disquieting air of loneliness and an unhealthy obsession for solitude? Introversion and shyness is one thing but locking yourself in your studio or working space for days going without food and social contact is entirely something different. Simply put, why do people who like to think and write and dream, wish to be alone or rather wish to be left alone?
I am not sure I have all the answers for as a writer, solitude is something I personally long for when I’m working on something. But over the years I have trained myself to mind the gap – the gap between what I think about my work and what the actual response I get to my writing. I have understood, the hard way, that in all this there is no room for what I want others to think about my writing. I have no right to decide for others how they choose to take my ideas. I have overcome my natural anxieties that as a writer I am bound to experience. I have learnt to tame my own demons, the voices in my head.
So on that note I present a toast to all that it takes to create something.
Here’s a toast
To our inner struggles…
To the tears left unshed and the sobs hushed away…
To the friends we lost to death and to time…
To our troubles and anxious reflections…
To pain, grief and sorrow…
To the voices in our head…
To those countless dreamless nights…
A toast to that creative genius we have inside us — breathing, struggling, fighting through each aching, breaking day…
May we have the strength to hold it.
The patience to hearken to its words.
& the wisdom to let it go when it’s time…
