Not so Bad

Since no one knows about me except Ketch Tavern I'm not as scared to share things I've written.  Once, when I was manic, and quite obviously not on the right medication, I wrote a three hundred page novel in five days.  When you're manic, you don't need sleep, not until the end of the mania, you actually can't sleep.  I stayed awake for five days writing a contemporary love story.  I feel like all the imagination has been sucked out of me by all these pills I take.  I can't even see signs and symbols in novels anymore when they're staring me in the face.  I guess it's a small price to pay for sanity, but I always wonder who I really am?  Who is the girl without the pills?  What does she like to do?  Does she take better care of her family?  Can she hold down a real job?  You see I live with a lot of guilt because I never know from one day to the next, if I'm going to have an excruciating headache or just not be able to get out of bed.  I can't be counted on.  Being a writer would be ideal for me, but like my desire for sex, my desire to create has been totally tamped down so that it takes a monumental effort to find even that spark.  I feel it.  I've written it about ten times, that story I want to tell.  But there are fundamental problems with it and the magic isn't there.  It's just flat.  So I'll have to take it sentence by sentence and correct it, maybe taking great swaths of writing out.  Meanwhile, my contemporary romance novel sits, ready to go.  It's crap, but so are a lot of the cookie cutters romance novels I've read these days.  And its not what I want to write.  I want to talk to that girl underneath all the pills and tell her story.  God, she used to have such an imagination.  Nobody ever told her she couldn't write.  Nobody ever told her she had to get a real job.  She was still full of wonder about the world around her, looking for fairies under toadstools and Easter baskets in the bushes.  She believed in magic.  How do I swim through this foggy swamp of a mind to the clean water she swims in?  Where are you?  Who would you have been?  I miss that little girl that cried and felt aching loneliness at the age of nine.  It's better than not feeling.  I can almost remember feeling that.  It's much easier to call up pain and sadness.  Happiness,  I don't even know if I've ever felt it.  Like my ten year old says, "I know the other feeling is coming back so it doesn't last."  I just want to know me with out the meds.  But I know the consequences of that and they're grim.  So this is me.  This. is. me.