On Mental Health & Writing

 This week has been a bad one. I've struggled with my mental health since last weekend - anxiety, depression, all that lovely stuff. I won't go into any details, but I've just felt surrounded by death, by endings, and the state of the world right now has fed into all that darkness and negativity and pushed me down into a big black hole. 

On the plus side, I feel a lot better today. I feel as if I can put last week behind me and push forward. And I think I know the reason why.

I wrote.

I wrote my way out of that big black hole.

It sounds simple, but it isn't. Writing these days doesn't come easily to me. When it does come, though, it's like a gift.

I've never really excelled at anything in life - always been a bit of a plodder, "just about good enough" at most things but never quite mastering anything. I'm good at my job, I think I'm an okay husband and father (I have my flaws, of course, as we all do), but I'm not "excellent" at any of those things. Just decent. Okay, Unexceptional.

Then there's the writing.

Writing is the one thing I feel I am good at - an area where I have excelled. My work isn't commercially successful, I haven't won any major awards, and it gets ignored in most general discussions of horror literature. But none of that matters. Writing is my attempt at making sense of the world. My writing has integrity, and, to me, that's the only thing that matters. Art has to be honest or it isn't art at all. Which is fine. I enjoy mindless a bit of pablum as much as the next person, but even though I consume it (and love it and champion it and need it in my life), I don't want to create it. 

So last week, I managed to write my way out of a bad place. The story I came up with is incredibly fucking dark, but it means something. It's valid. It's personal. It did not exist in the world before I created it. That means something. It's valuable.