inspiration, that slippery devil

A lot of times when you are manic, you have INSPIRATION. Not just regular lowercase inspiration. It's the uppercase kind. Mania increases everything, and a lot of sufferers of bipolar disorder are creative. So when you add INSPIRATION to that, you can get some interesting things. INSPIRATION is magic. It is fire. It is a force that grabs onto you and squeezes. INSPIRATION is like your exact level of consciousness is being transported from you onto paper or canvas or keyboard. You are one and the same. It's a magical feeling.

I refer to INSPIRATION in the manic sense. I'll confess that INSPIRATION is possible without bipolar disorder. It is, however, very common for it to be a part of a manic episode. Before I was on medication, I had the uppercase often. I would spend nights at my piano and watch the sun rise with a new song playing in the background. I would sit on the stoop of my apartment at 1 in the morning and absorb, and then spend all night editing and writing page after page of a book. I painted really cute rabbits all over my apartment, covering the walls after I ran out of paper. It was who I was, consumed my entire identity while it was happening, compelled me to focus all of my burning attention solely on it. That's INSPIRATION.

There are a lot of famous people with bipolar disorder. I can bet that a lot of them have seen INSPIRATION. I know I sure have. Have you? Maybe even just a glimpse.

Then, there are a lot of people who say that once they started their medication, they lost INSPIRATION. I can't say yea or nay to that, I'm not in their heads. I've found that since I've started my medication I've had less of the upper case and more of the lowercase. I still get inspired. Life inspires me to write. A note on the piano inspires me to compose. The set of a camera angle inspires me to film, to act. I am still inspired.

It just that sometimes something feels like it's in the way of that. I get the inspiration but I have to struggle to get it out. The song is in me but when I get it through to the keyboard it is diluted, strained. The rabbits sit there looking lost. I can't come up with the right words to type. I am still inspired, but I need to find a way for that inspiration to come out in whatever way it can. Maybe I can't write a whole song overnight, but I can still play the piano. I can still write. Sometimes it will hurt, remembering what I had been able to do, but it makes me thankful for what I have.

So there have been few songs written lately. This blog has been the extent of my typing. I think I've drawn two rabbits this year, and they were little ones on chart paper because I was bored and angry. I've not acted a single role in at least two years. I've been away from the stage since I was medicated. Am I scared that I've lost that inspiration? Maybe.

But this entry is about inspiration, and INSPIRATION. I can still get INSPIRATION. If it starts knocking on my door and I start staying up just a little later with it and then start giving myself up to it I will be gone. What's wrong with going with your inspiration, you say? I think there is nothing wrong with exploring where your inspiration takes you. I recommend it, actually. It's just that when you give yourself up to INSPIRATION you might find that a week has gone by and you've eaten a single bowl of cereal and haven't slept or left your chair. No, I haven't lost INSPIRATION. I just have to make a deal with her. She can't pick me up and carry me away with her any more.

With bipolar, you have to make deals. There's always the big shiny up up up bet it all, throw away the key manic side. You can always escape to the manic side, that's a given. It just takes a slip of the meds, some sleep deprivation. Stress. God, even jet lag can affect mania. Mania isn't caused, it's just something that is held at bay by medication.

And that's what you have to do, hold it at bay. And if that means standing up INSPIRATION then that's that. I would rather be able to sit at my piano and write for fun than feel driven to sit up night after night making masterpieces. INSPIRATION takes all the fun out of creating because it's so desperate.

Do I want a life? Yes. But it doesn't have to be so all or nothing, so black and white. Bipolar makes things black and white. Yes and No. Manic and Depressed. There is no maybe, no "sort of". I want a life but that doesn't mean a life void of creativity. I still have fire, and I think it would take several armies to beat my creativity into submission. So I can't give into INSPIRATION any more and spend days obsessively immersed in a single thing. Yes it felt amazing. No I can't do that and stay healthy. But I can have inspiration. The breeze on my face. The sun setting on the mountain. My cat falling down the stairs (shhhh, she's not hurt.) Life happens in between the black and white.

I won't lie though, certain medications have made me into a zombie in the past. Medications are always a balancing act, a little of this, some of that, figure out how it all balances. So on the way to your "right" balance you might make a stop in zombie town, or a rocket to the moon. I've been zombified. It was horrible, everything felt just past my grasp, like I was running too slowly to take part in the rest of the world. And I didn't care. This is what scares me enough to make sure I'm in an open dialogue with my doctors so that my medication remains current. I might have to go through the zombie stage again. Who can tell?

But even when I'm at my worst, when I can't speak because all the words are gone, when I can't keep up with what you're saying, when I can't just f***ing focus on what is going on around me, I know I am alive. And if I forget this, I have someone around to remind me.

There's the hyperfocus of INSPIRATION and the quicksand bog of overmedication. In bipolar, it's a good chance you'll have to deal with both. But then there's sun and snow and children and cookies and crayons and ice cream and nighttime and music and car rides and the colour blue and friends.

And life.