Depression and x-mas time.

Myself and depression have an on going relationship that comes and goes. There was a time when I entered a deep depression and struggled to get out of it. Somehow I did but around this time of the year it comes back and visits me. Speaking with several other friends of mine I know I am not the only one. As much as I dislike myself when I get depressed I write some of my best works and create some of my best art because of it.
Last year in an attempt to define myself I created this piece of writing. I guess it's a way to defend my actions when depression and I get together to celebrate the christmas holidays.
I have studiously tried to avoid using the word madness to describe my actions. Now and again, the word slips out, but I dislike it. Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds (myself included). That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of my condition. Madness is delightful to the beholder, scary in its way, but still fun to watch, a sport for spectators and rubbernecks who can't avert their eyes from the awefulness that they know they shouldn't be seeing. It's every great moment in rock and roll, and it's probably every great moment in popular culture. The elegance and beauty of Cio-Cio-San as she bleeds to death in Madame Butterfly, or of the double suicide in Romeo and Juliet: That is the domain of madness alone. The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony. Why must every literary examination of so many writers and artists, keep perpetuating the notion that their individual pieces of genius were the result of madness? While it may be true that a great deal of art finds its inspiration wellsprung in sorrow, let's not kid ourselves about how much time each of these people wasted and lost by being mired in misery. So many productive hours slipped by as a paralyzing despair took over. No one writes during depressive episodes. If they were manic-depressives, they worked during hypomania, the productive precursor to a manic phase which allows a peak of creative energy to flow; if they were unipolar depressives, they create during their periods of reprive. This is not to say that we should deny sadness it's rightful place among the muses of all art forms, but let's stop calling it madness, let's stop pretending that the feeling itself is interesting. Let's call it depression and admit that it is very bleak. Sure, madness draws crowds, sells tickets, keeps The National Enquirer in business. Yet so many suffer in silence, without anyone knowing, their plight somehow invisible until they adpot the antics of madness which are impossible to ignore. Depression is such an uncharismatic disease, so much the opposite of the lively vibrance that one associates with madness. Now, to sum this up, remember that when you're at the point at which you're doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it's only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as it's by-product.
Even though sucide got mentioned several times in there, I have never seriously considered harming myself. I'm not the self destructive type. I prefer to destroy outwardly. I don't know what I think I am accomplishing by posting about it aside from letting those who suffer alone know that they really aren't. If you don't like this time of year, neither do I.