Evening and Morning

Having regained sanity after a full night's sleep, I wonder at the berserk racing of thoughts that choked my awareness and stood me upon a perpetual precipice of hysterical tears. If you think you can go four or five days without adequate sleep and perform normal human actions unaffected, you are stone cold stupid. I for one am grateful for the world around me now that I've shut it out solidly for at least six hours.

I feel I learned a few interesting things about myself in the process of exhaustion, primarily that I haven't been stricken with the compulsion to write like that in a very long time. Granted, what I had to say was mostly gibbering rhetoric, I decided early on not to restrict my creativity when it needed to flow, nor censor what I felt I needed to share, (despite being pants-on-head crazy at the time.) Further, I found myself watching a parade of mental disease cavort about in my fogged awareness. In doing so, I unflinchingly labeled my obsessive compulsive triggers, my anxiety disorder, and a peculiar mania when it comes to cleaning. That's it. After years of struggling with labels and treatments, it was comforting to discover my mental flaws aren't all that bad or numerous. Just persistent.

Perhaps creativity is a form of madness. I've heard a lot of talk about artists who can only channel their talents through emotional pain, and that lacking such traumatic stimuli, the potency saps from the process. Takes the blues off 'em, if you will. Skimming the acknowledgments of some of my favorite novelists, I see many grateful nods to those friends and family that put up with the author's own brand of crazy, and absence, during the writing process.

This creates a challenge in my mind that I am loathe to entertain seriously. By restricting sleep and cranking up the emotional resonance, would then the words flow? What could I create under those conditions? Moreover, how long could I maintain that momentum?

It's a bad idea. I dislike my mania on a good day, and I lived the sleepless, addicted lifestyle once before. While the writing that came out of it was quality, and the relationship fostered with my long-distance writing partner planted the seed that would become my current romance, the cost of health, mental degradation and job performance was too costly.

Still, it is good to know I am yet capable of such a thing. Perhaps it is not the worst idea I've had.