Okay, the title is just a tongue-and-cheek joke. I just wanted to make something a little more lighthearted and less structured post. Partly because I’ve recognized that I often blog when I want to make a Statement™ or rant about an issue in my life. Frankly, I don’t want to read myself being a pompous brat in his early 20s, yeah? I highly doubt anyone who does care enough to read my crap wants to either. So I’ll let myself be as honest, cynical and messy as I like.
The real point of this post is to deconstruct my own dependencies on mental illness as a “creative tool” and how it’s caused me to self-destruct all in the name of “art”. You might think this is hyperbolic, but I assure you that the romanticization of mental illness is a real problem amongst creative types and I am no exception.
I remember that the first time I decided to get help/medication for my ADHD that I was going to be a different person. I was a teenager at that time, and it might be silly now looking back, but it was still a real fear I had. Which didn’t really help with the onslaught of the art community (in general) encouraging the use of negative emotions to create “better” art. The trope of the “tortured poet” is a prevalent example. It’s treated as a good thing to be making an ass of yourself and using your worst tendencies to create “great things”, but it’s nothing more than a lie I used to subscribe to in my youth. The biggest misconception that mental illness says to you is, you’re less interesting as a person without it, that it is the only good thing about you.
As it turns out, I made shit in spite of my depression and anxiety, not BECAUSE of it. I’m still making things now even as my mental health gets gradually better. Those dark times didn’t give me new material, instead art was just a way to cope through them. There wasn’t really much rationality to keep holding onto those issues I kept piling up for myself. There are things I can’t control and can become jaded with, but I wasn’t really making it any easier for myself by ignoring all the things I could change. I basically refused accountability for my actions, instead using my terrible mental health as an excuse to be selfish and attention-seeking.
Art is made with strong emotions, but I forgot that happiness is an emotion too and it shouldn’t be any less valid to paint something that is happy. Clearly, ranting and raving away about how terrible life is didn’t make things better. Being optimistic wasn’t about naivety or being willingly ignorant of life around you, but to stand in front of a self-serious world and laugh anyways. Reality is terrible, but it also has a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s okay to be happy when things feel like shit and it’s okay to be sad when things are looking up. When the sun sets, it’ll eventually rise again.
Bonds that were forged out of mental illness didn’t last long in my experience. People come and go. You can outgrow the people you used to be buddies with and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if the only reason I was friends with someone is out of their pity for me or vice versa, it would eat away at the both of us until it led to our eventual downfall. And I don’t want that life, it’s incredibly exhausting and sad. I mean if the only thing that was binding us was a shitty life, would we have even been friends in the first place? The paranoia and existential crisis isn’t worth the potential relationships I would gain from my self-destruction.
Negative emotions shouldn’t be the only thing that is considered “deep” or “poetic”. You know a weird thing I’ve observed is that misery gets conflated with “intelligence” when in my experience, I tend to do irrational things when I’m miserable. Sure, there are times where I was still sane enough to create something decent. But other times, I tend to say or do the nastiest shit that isn't true or reasonable. I wasn’t any less out of touch compared to the people who were blissfully ignorant. I just did a 180 of that same mentality, not really changing for the better. Revolving my whole life around how I thought life was terrible, actually made me insufferable to be around.
I came to the realization that most people avoided me not because “I said it as it was” or that “they just didn’t get it”, but because I was stomping on what little happiness anyone had for anything, for no reason other than to sound clever. Being miserable all the time didn’t make me a prestigious thinker. It just made me an asshole.