We are experiencing Creational Difficulties- please stand by!

Those who have been following this young, precocious blog from the beginning may recall a few dire, cryptic warnings about 'dry periods,' times when updates will be few and far between. This is one of those times.

I am profoundly bi-polar. The pattern of my life is almost entirely defined by the irregular cycle of my mental illness, which can have me dangerously manic for minutes, hours, even days at a time, or plunge me into depression from which I may take weeks to emerge. The depression isn't any fun, but it's a known entity. We can handle it. The mania is worse; just when we think we've coined it, some new, ugly feature will expose itself, a previously non-existent emotional reaction or anxiety-trigger. 

It makes me a hard person to know, once you get below the charismatic veneer that I present to most of the world. Only two or three dozen people know what's under that top layer of me, the public face that isn't a mask but isn't the full picture, either. This is probably true for most people, but the difference, in my case, is that the number of individuals--family aside--who've gotten that close to me and have decided to stick with me to the end can be counted on one hand. The others were wise to get away, and I don't blame them. The last thing I want is to chain others to my illness. Those who are still with me are a special breed, seemingly immune to my emotional toxicity.

Damn, I've gone all maudlin. I think what I was getting at when I started was that my creativity is inherently tied to my emotional state. In the deepest depression, I can barely handle feeding and bathing myself, much less putting words to page. In fact, at those times, I am often completely cut off from whatever it is inside me that generates my stories, or channels them, or whatever. I've often been struck with a profound horror at such times, a fear that the stories have left me and will never return. I sometimes wonder if amputees feel the same terror when they discover their missing limb, and then later, when the stories start buzzing and I'm writing again, I'm ashamed to have made such a comparison.

Mania, as I've said, is often worse. If depression is a whirlpool that sucks everything down to fathomless depths, never to rise again, mania is its inverse, a tornado that uproots everything in its path, leaving carnage and chaos in its wake. There is a certain stage of mania that I can harness and channel into bursts of creative verve, but for the most part my manic periods are characterized by insomnia, mercurial temper, and a tangled mess of unfinished projects and half-formed ideas.

It is between these two extremes where I find productivity, and the longer I have lived with Bi-Polar Disorder, the more I have become able to find balance. I have not accomplished this feat alone; I am reliant on clever medication, occasional bouts of therapy, and the support of those who love me, those few people who have silently sworn, for reasons of their own that I rarely dare to question, to support and defend me, whatever may come. 

So where am I now? Stuck in the doldrums. Dealing with the lingering aftermath of a complicated injury, looking forward to probably another month of limited mobility and restricted activity (and after six or seven months of this, each seems agonozingly longer than the last), and entirely without any fresh ideas. I'm poking listlessly at ongoing projects, stuffing envelopes with anything that meets my fairly draconian standards of being publishable, and hoping beyond hope that something fresh will come along and I won't be scraping the bottom of the barrel come my next submission deadline. It sucks, but I have to keep plugging away if I'm going to make this work. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said: "Amateurs wait for inspiration. Professionals just get to work."

That's the short explanation of why my blog posts haven't been coming as frequently. I hope it helps clear things up.