6:20 p.m. Creativity Stymied

One movie later -- Miss Potter -- and I'm feeling more myself. I also gorged on potato chips and Nerds, which may have put the sugar junky monkey at bay for now. It's not something I'm proud of, so we will not mention this again.

Here's the kicker, though, about watching a movie about a creative mind, who talks to her works of art, no less: you begin to wonder if she wasn't a little off in her head, and then you wonder why you, who may have this thing that many creative minds reputedly have had as well, cannot produce a creative work to save your life. Now, you're either substandard in the creativity department -- after all, whole worlds don't run around in your head, only a narrator who proceeds to narrate your entire life at sporadic moments when you should be sleeping -- or you're lazy.

When I think back on it, my most creative moments were at school: (1) at college when I lived by myself in a small efficiency, worked three jobs, and stayed up all hours of the night, just to get up for an 8 a.m. class and (2) in graduate school where I worked incessantly in my office, churning out paper after paper, essay after essay. If the professor wanted 20 pages, I'd write 40. I was mad with the working of it. And toward the end, burnt out, my stomach a wreck, and my digestive system with it.

But then, I had something to show for it.

Of course, there was that brief flirting with a romance novel that got very close to 200 pps. once. Even then, I wrote in long, productive bursts, that suddenly fizzled, as if I'd shot my wad all at once, as did my confidence. So why am I able to start, but never able to finish? Why so abortive? Is it the depression that always creeps in, the lack of self? Was it the inevitable cycling that comes with hyperproductivity, or more to the point, hypomania?

Damn the depression. Where is my upswing?