Does Being Crazy Make You a Great Artist?

Crazy is not a technical term. It simply means that one day I'd like to strip naked and show my tatas to the moon. And that's not being poetic. I really want to do that some misty Harry Potter night. But bipolar, ADHD, and anxiety are technical terms with real meanings. I won't go into that now. That's another article. This article questions the fact that crazy and all the technical terms can bring out the Poe and the Basquiat in us all. But as soon as we are medicated and feeling balanced, we become average nerds attempting poetry that sucks. So does crazy make us artistic geniuses and do drugs, the illegal candy, make us Warhol.

When I'm anxious as fuck, I'm a literary bombshell, but when the meds kick in, and I'm glad they do kick in, I have nothing much interesting to say. I'm feeling anxious today because I got so little sleep last night and instead watched the show Catfish for half the night. I was on creative fire this morning. I wrote three articles for work with no research...and they made sense. But I can't be like this everyday. I wouldn't want to be like this everyday. It would be annoying. I annoy myself and when our dog Dobby scratches up my leg, I'm really pissed. I'd rather he piss on it than tear my skin up with his claws.

When I'm anxious, I'd rather a lot of things, like right now I don't see a save changes button on this article and I really would like to see that so I don't lose all this genius shit I'm writing....still no save changes button and I'm freaking out. Anyway, if it wasn't for crazy would we have had a Poe or a Mozart or a Basquiat? I don't think we'll ever truly know. My guess is they would have been tucked away in some normal relationship with some normal person trying their best to find out what love is.

Do we need to choose between crazy and creative and calm and mediocre? This could be the case, but I'd prefer a happy medium if we could work that out with the universe. I'll settle for 'hey, cool article' instead of 'hey, that blew me away!' I'll take it. Every technical word has it's own kind of crazy and its own kind of creative and we work through it as best we can.

Maybe at my most frantic, I'm still no Poe or Nikki Giovanni. Maybe, just maybe I'm creative and mediocre. Wouldn't that be some shit to meditate on? Actually that may be as close to truth as most of us will ever come. Crazy and mediocre.

I know crazy is an offensive word to some, usually those who suffer from no type of mental disorder. I certainly don't mean it as an insult to you or myself. As a person who never knew why I couldn't get anything done or finish any project or lose my mind over what others consider small, I know that there is no small thing and I'm fortunate to have the medication I need to be my calm mediocre self. I don't take mental disorders and diseases lightly. But I do wonder if I'd be the same person right now at this age without my meds. I wonder if I could finish that book and have it be brilliant all at the same time.

This is for me, a gift to accept myself fully. This is for you to love yourself unconditionally. This is for those who still have no idea what their diagnosis is. This is for those who can't accept their diagnosis. We are all life artists taking our broken pieces and turning them into mosaics.