From a very young age, I knew that I was going to be a writer. I was absolutely certain of this eventuality, to the point I took it for granted. It was going to happen.
What I failed to realize was that from the moment my pencil touched the wide-ruled paper of my Big Chief notebook in second grade and I began to write my very first short story, I was a writer.
I was operating under the assumption that everything I wrote was mere practice for the day when some important person behind a big desk in a big, towering skyscraper somewhere would publish my first novel and officially validate me as a real writer. But that’s not what makes one a writer. Writing makes one a writer, simply put.
I wrote a lot. Daily journal entries, short stories, letters to friends, poems… the medium didn’t matter. I just had to write. It was a compulsion.
This continued until I was midway through my first year of college. And then gradually the writing began to slow down until one day it stopped altogether. The muse in my head quit speaking. I had no desire to write. But why?
After a lifetime of wondering what was wrong with my brain, I was diagnosed with OCD and prescribed the drug LUVOX. This pill promised to be the solution to all of my problems.
And while it did successfully alleviate the symptoms of my disorder, it also turned me into a borderline sociopath.
I won’t go into any great detail about what I mean by that, but suffice it to say, for the purposes of this post, I had no desire to write. For years I languished in a perpetual state of apathy, the emaciated husk of my creative impetus collecting dust in a darkened corner of my mind.
I switched to Prozac and soon after churned out a couple of novels which I self-published as a warm-up to doing something on a larger scale, but it was a struggle.
I got creative again. Started working on little projects like recording a rap album, vocals and beats done entirely by me, and it was good. People asked why I didn’t do creative things like that for a living. I couldn’t really give them a definitive answer.
EventuallyI weaned myself off of all psychiatric meds, and though that in itself has caused issues, I did start feeling like myself again.
I now take buspar for anxiety and it doesn’t really have that kind of soul-numbing effect that the heavier drugs had.
I feel like me circa 1995 again. Emotional, brimming with creativity, sometimes a wreck but more equipped to deal with it.
I view this blog as a mind-sharpening exercise. I’m writing, right now. I’m bringing words together and forming them into something that I’d find interesting as a reader. Most importantly, I’m developing a habit of self-expression again, and I find it very cathartic so far. I’ve never wanted to do anything but write and create, and I’m very optimistic about this positive new direction I’ve begun to take myself in.
Patrick Walts 