Mental Health and Writing.

So for some time I’ve put off writing something that is probably important for either myself or potentially others for me to write it. I’ve not shared this post with anyone who I traditionally share my posts with. Part of me is afraid they’d tell me not to post it or I’d be too afraid to say any of it or write any of it if I thought too much about who was going to see it. 

Anyone who knows me well enough probably knows or could guess that I’m not the most mentally healthy person there is. I have massive depression and anxiety issues, many of which have kept me from keeping this website up to date, writing short stories, and improving my writing and skills as an author. Some part of me wants to stop here knowing that someone will see this as an excuse for my behavior or laziness. In reality, I understand that this is part of my own mind, part of me that tries to shut myself down, part of the fight every day that I must win in order to get out of bed, to do anything at all.

See? This is what I mean about all this, anxiety and depression work together to try and stop me from doing anything, and encourage the negative feeling inside my mind to keep me from taking action, telling me that I am lazy, weak, not worth listening to. I’ve destroyed friendships for this, driven people away who, I’d felt, had gotten too close because I felt that I was not a good person anyone would want to be friends with. I know that this is not true, I have real friends who I trust, but in the back of my mind, that part of me is always there.

This sort of peaked during the 2016 presidential election, as anyone can probably tell since that’s around when my last posts for this site are dated. I didn’t disagree with Donald Trump on policy or politics I disagreed with who he was as a person, I disagreed with the very idea of someone like him being elected president. His business management style, his actions, the way he spoke was abhorrent to me as a person. 

The worst part of this was that I couldn’t present this to people since so many wanted to insist that it was all just media bias against him, that it was all fake news. I tried to explain how Trump making someone feel that way was far more dangerous than whether or not it was true or fake news. It was too divisive, too much my tribe versus your tribe kind of thinking, and any candidate who spoke and encouraged that kind of thinking was someone I would be vehemently against. That kind of thinking is the way you get to a point where you start to excuse actions that maybe you should be abhorrent of. It also carries the risk of opening the door to someone worse.

A great example of this would be in Warren Ellis’ comic series Transmetropolitan in which one of the stories is about the Beast running against the Smiler. The Beast is a Trump-like corrupt president, and the Smiler is a truly evil man, but can just spin everything against him as though it is fake news, because of the precedent the Beast had set of being Anti-media or the media being anti-president.

Now, in our real world, the media is as much to blame as Trump is for the anti-media sentiment that is going around now. The idea however of listening to some random guy on youtube who can’t possibly have the learning or resources to investigate so many of the different topics that they speak as though they are experts on that are so difficult that many real experts are in disagreement about how to handle it. I hate that I had to use the qualifier “real” there.

Simple solutions being given as though they are really easy but scientists or the deep state are actively trying to suppress it are also likely, not real. Since Trump peddled in simple solutions to complex and overwhelming problems, I could never trust him or anything he said.

That’s too much about Trump but as you can guess this seriously hurt my mental health and ability to trust others. 

So what I really want to talk about is how my mental health affects my writing, mostly I wanted to talk about how it affects my writing style not my ability to push myself to write at all since that’s probably pretty obvious from what can be seen simply by the date between this and the last time I posted anything on this website and the first few paragraphs of this post. 

I would like to say in points that there are characters and events that I could never have imagined without my mental state. A thing about my mental health was that I sometimes am forced to hide within my own mind to find solace from the world too dangerous and cruel to face. That, as I was younger, gave me a huge amount of problems with dealing with people as it had become difficult for me at times to tell what was real and what was my imagination. I know that for me there was a path out of that, with the help of my friends, I was able to create for me a point of reference for what was real, and how to force past myself to get closer to where I wanted to be. 

In a way, that trapped in my imagination-state granted me the ability to imagine in a way that allows me to write the way I do. Sometimes, I know that I use the same words too many times but usually when I write I keep an eye on that, but this time I want to write raw, and going back to edit it that way might get me to erase parts of that that I might feel too afraid to keep. 

One of the aspects of my writing that many people can probably catch on to pretty quickly would be my critique of religion. Some of that comes from my mental health and the fact that religion never helped me with it, and at times when it was forced in my direction actually hurt me. It made me distrustful of people I should have been able to trust. The idea of “everything happening for a reason” and that there was the big benevolent power above that had decided for some arbitrary reason that I was not worth its pity or time was harmful to my mind. Still, to this day someone saying that to me is something that bothers me and offends me on a level that they could never possibly understand. 

I’ve gone on before about how I feel the organized religion version of God is too small for me to accept in any real capacity, and If I haven’t then that’s something I will likely do later at some point.

Anyway, so I imagined a world unlike ours, one where mythological stories did happen in the truest ways I could manage. A Story with Aliens and advanced technology and world-hopping super-beings, things we can only imagine but could be used as an explanation of mythological events far outside what we see as the realms of reality. This, of course, meant that my world had to be very different from our own. I could not simply have a world that was like ours but with aliens as ancient gods, but rather, how would our world be different if the stories were as close to truthful as we understood them, and aliens filled in the gaps. 

Would the Spartans be stronger if they were part alien? Would the Roman Empire fall if it was ruled by someone who understood their technology? Would the Jade Emperor rule China from the clouds? How would a world crafted and shaped from the Mythos of our world actually look? What characters would still be around now? And which would be long forgotten?

Where potentially there is an overarching God in that universe but not one that is all benevolent and good, but one who is human-like, with all the conflicted implications that carries with it. One who created a universe as much as a test that it could then a real desire to create life, and the repercussions of that decision. The moral quandary of what would be right to do after that point, what decisions or actions could such a being take to live with itself, what would it regret. 

The very concept of what makes a god a God was an idea that I could ultimately only contemplate with my rejection of organized religion. My idea of what I would define God would be in my opinion rather simple, it would be something so alien and unknowable to us that its existence would be no different from its nonexistence. Meaning anything you could perceive or define as God would thereby not be. 

So something that some of you might be wondering by this point which of my characters are the one that I imagined myself as? Which was the power fantasy that I used to hide in to escape reality? Well, that’s Simple, it’s Raziel, you know the name referenced on my website’s domain. But, you ask where is Raziel? Well, that’s simple also, he’s been written out of the story. Anyone who’s read the original versions of my story knows he was a main character, he never had any parts written from his perspective and his actions were always used as the catalyst to everything that happened in the story that he was the real antagonist whether I wanted him to be or not. He also had an evil doppelganger that I guess at some point was the representation of my depression and anxiety. Both were removed from the story at some point and haven’t been characters for years. 

There were a whole plethora of biblically named characters from that time, but they have all either been renamed and repurposed or been removed entirely. 

Therein lies one of the other ways that my mental health affects my writing, it makes me never satisfied with my work, I must always strive to be better and work to improve it. That is if it doesn’t stop me from doing anything by feeling that it is not any good. In some ways that is helpful because I know, I will improve every time, but in some ways, it can hurt to the point where I don’t feel like there is a point in writing or publishing things. 

I have written things during that long downtime that I did not publish, and there are projects that I am currently working on. As long as I can move past myself I know I can make something really worth reading, but every day it is a struggle to win that fight. But it’s a fight I have to keep on fighting, and not just for me, not just to be a better author, but for everyone else who is also fighting that fight. How can I look someone in the eye and appreciate their pain if I don’t stand up and bear my own? The world is uncaring and if we don’t stand up and stand together to care about each other to move past stigmas of mental illness and move forward as a species together there won’t be anything there to catch and save us. There’s no superman coming to save the day, no Jesus to rapture away the faithful. There is only each other. And we must stand together, we must work as a people who want to see each other succeed and to encourage our own growth, to strive to be the best at what we are good at and for those around us to support us in every way they can. 

I want to be someone I can be proud of being, I want to be the best at what I can do, and I know that if I can just look past myself long enough that is achievable. And to everyone that knows this struggle that understands what I’m saying and where I’m coming from on a level that they may or may not be comfortable sharing, I believe in your ability to be someone you can be proud of too.

There’s so much more that I want to say, but I suppose now isn’t the time to say it. I probably should feel more focused on publishing this before I change my heart and mind against it. Every part of me is fighting to finish the page and press that inevitable publish button or to just press backspace until the entire thing is gone. If you’re reading this you know which side won out. If not, then, there’s always next time.

Edit: I realize in retrospect weeks later this wound up being much tamer than I originally intended oh well.