Some people say this sounds like a big bummer, but I believe in life there are so many good & bad things that the best way is to find how you can be "content" with yourself and your life. To do otherwise is like gambling, that next card could put you at 20, or it might 'f' up your day, or year, or longer, losing your life's savings.
On the flipside you could just sit on your couch and play video games, the ones where you don't have a live team of people to talk to, just yourself and the games. And never try to do anything above just "existing."
That's been me for a while now, due to a double whammy of Bipolar 1 and Extreme Panic Disorder. And the shame of it is that it's really the medicine that put the brakes on my creativity: the art & writing I studied in college, the music I taught myself to compose, all that's in storage somewhere in my head.
The drugs keep me employed, housed, fed . . . If it weren't for the drugs, I'd probably be homeless by now cause in my manic swings, where how long they lasted was a completely unknown period of time (hours? days? weeks? months?) I had some delusions in my teens that went on for a good year and involved some very complex alternate realities. People dismissed my resulting behavior as:
"oh, he's just weird" or
"oh, he's just excentric" or
"oh, he's just making that up for a reason to act strange.)
The thing is, at work, before medication therapy, my mania came with a bloodlust for arguing with upper management. Including shouting arguments with a former Store Manager (I survived that because he actually respected me for standing up for myself! Welcome to the politics of manhood, hehe.)
So, I'm in a 24-year rut and I want the fuck out! I've even considered going off meds.
I've heard that a large number of actors and musicians (and artists of all types) have bipolar disorder.
Having an inability to exceed at "normal" things, like the "average normal" person, tends to push one towards places where they can fit in. "The Land of the Misfit Toys" from that stop motion Rudolph movie by Rankin Bass, who turned the cartoon version of "Return of the King" into a freaking musical!
And since this creativity is fueled by the disorder, the last thing they want to do is control it with meds. Often describes as a "chemical straight jacket" it turns out, by personal experience, exactly that.
As Jeffery Goines says in the Terry Gilliam film "12 Monkeys" . . .
"Fuck the Bozos!"
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