I have been on and off antidepressants all of my adult life. They do what they are supposed to do. They keep me from feeling the lows. And they also keep me from feeling the highs. The problem is that my creative writing is fueled by those lows and highs.
My late former husband, who also suffered from depression and was a writer, refused to take antidepressants because, he said, “I’m afraid that if my demons leave, my angels will as well.”
And that’s what often happens.
William Wordsworth said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”.
Antidepressants tend to neutralize those powerful feelings. I miss those feelings, and my writing has suffered, especially my poetry.
This was inspired, more than twenty years ago, by “..they paved paradise and put in a parking lot..” from Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi.
Under a dark moon,
she hunts the land for what
she cannot leave behind:
the scent of marigold
crushed on skin;
the fragile grace
of seedling maples;
the soft acceptance
of lambs ear leaves —
all lost to the dark,
to a place too ruined
for digging.
Tirelessly, she wrestles
the ghosts she has come
to free from the hold
of reluctant stone,
from the evil spell
binding the earth once
worked with the patient
need of her hands.
Held by the moment,
I breathe deeply
the sharp-scented air,
search for signs
of moon in the sky,
pray to find
what has been lost
from her night
and from my own.
As an anti-depression user myself, I can understand your concern. But I believe what you are feeling (or think you’re feeling is normalcy. The one thing I noticed after being on the medication for a few weeks was how the cobwebs that had taken over my thoughts, had cleared away leaving me to actually think more clearly about things. Quite the opposite of “Dulling the senses.”
Well, maybe “normal” for me was being able to have those emotional highs and lows that fuel intense creativity. But they got out of hand. I would love to find a way to have it both ways. Maybe it depends on what antidepressants one takes.
Wonderful