Creativity.

I read somewhere that the part of your brain responsible for creativity is the same, or right next to, the part of your brain that causes schizophrenia. They concluded that all creative people are a little bit crazy because of this. It's been long enough that I don't have the article anymore, but I'm sure if you do some creative googling you can pull up a similar study.

I'm on medication for anxiety & OCD, which I've discussed before, but I've noticed something lately. Mostly I get ideas for my story when I'm alone - laying awake at night, or when I'm walking by myself around campus, anywhere I can be in solitude and let my imagination go. Lately, though, I've got nothing. No new ideas, and no motivation to expand on the ideas that I do have, no drive to work on the story I've already started.

A lot of times on TV the characters on medication stop taking their drugs because they don't feel like themselves anymore, and now I can totally see where those characters are coming from - I can only assume they are based on the experiences of real people.

I need the medication, it keeps me from being out of control. I hated the way I felt all the time when I wasn't on it. But I miss the creativity. I used to make characters who had so much depth that I felt like they were the ones writing the story, I was just putting it into words. I made whole worlds for them to explore, or just set them loose in this one.

I don't write my stories anymore.

In my modern US history class we're studying 1919-20 and did you know, they used to give out cocaine and heroin to people as medicine? That was before the days of the FDA but it makes me wonder what they'll discover about the stuff I'm on in 80 years. Will they look back and say, "Wow, I can't believe they gave so many people these medicines when we know now how dangerous they are, the long term effects of these drugs are terrible!"? I worry that I'll never get that creativity back.