I am considered by myself and by many others to be a very creative person. I enjoy using my imagination, and ideas and thoughts of a creative nature occur to me naturally.
However, this is both a blessing and a curse.
It’s a blessing because I never have problems decorating school projects, quick catch-phrases pretty much attack me, and you can give me any type of material and in about five to fifteen minutes I either have created or am well on my way to creating a masterpiece.
It’s a curse because sometimes, my brain will not SHUT UP.
I’m not just talking about the occasional thing that pops into your head and you write it down, meaning to come back to it later. I’m talking about something that attacks your brain and takes it hostage, not letting it go until whatever story it has is out on paper, the drawing is sketched, or the music is found. And most of the time it’s not just one thing, it’s like, five. On the bad days it can be fifteen or twenty ideas clamoring around in my skull, demanding my immediate attention.
Last night was one such night. My brain finally shut itself down at two in the morning, and I gladly fell asleep.
And before you ask, no. I do not have ADD.
It can get very frustrating. When I’m at school, and that time limit is coming up in twenty minutes, and I need something on my paper, but my brain wants to develop that one character some more. When I need to focus on my homework, but my mind is literally wandering. My notebooks at school have random pages devoted to doodles and poems and stories, many of which I never even finish.
I’ve had this creativity disease for as long as I can remember. Until about the age of nine, it was virtually impossible for me to think in terms of first person. My stream of consciousness read like a book until I finally reined it in over a period of about half a year (That was a very tiresome period. It’s hard to convert from ‘she’ to ‘I’). When I was younger, I would spend hours at night in my bed concocting stories for my stuffed animals. They would go on elaborate adventures, and they all had back stories and personalities. I would play until I fell asleep.
I also read like a maniac. Still do, in fact. I cannot get enough of stories, and will pretty much read anything you put in front of me. I read the last Harry Potter book in less than thirty six hours. The last Eragon book in less than two days (And how very disappointing it was, too.). I had a 12.9 reading level by third grade. My vocabulary is bigger than even I think it is, which is proven to me every time I write an essay.
And, well, it’s all well and good until someone goes insane. People joke about the voices? Yeah, they’re real. And sometimes they sound suspiciously like my sister, but never mind that.
Because, the problem with being so brilliantly creative is that you open yourself up to see the world through a different lens than most other people. With this comes the added problem of being more susceptible to emotion. Everyones tragedy is your own. So is their happiness.
You see it all throughout history. Musicians and painters and artists who go certifiably insane. I can certainly see why. It’s an awful lot of stuff to handle and sort through.
But that’s where the beauty of being so imaginative comes in handy. When things get a little rough, you shove it all away and go to your ‘happy place’. And before you ask, no. I’m not sharing!
So that’s what my brain looks like on a regular basis. It’s messy, it’s disorganized, and it’s insanely creative. But no, I don’t want any medication to ‘fix it’. There’s nothing wrong with it. My brain is exactly the way God made it to be, and while sometimes I don’t always like His choices (mostly at three am, because come on God, I have school tomorrow.), I couldn’t imagine being any other way. And if I can’t then you won’t be able to either, so don’t even try!
What Is This Crazyness? 