Kristi Hébert

It’s taken me a long time to realize that not everyone channels their mental illness the same way. I read a lot of darker fiction; post-apocalyptic nightmares, our world changed either beyond reckoning or in such miniscule ways that we can cringe and fidget, realizing that it’s only a small step that keeps our reality from looking like theirs. I read the Facebook posts and Tweets by the authors of my favorite books, and I wish I was like them.

I’m torn between the desire to use my depression to fuel my writing and the fear that getting better mean that I won’t write at all. It’s difficult enough for me to work through the haze, the malaise that permeates my brain and fogs my creativity. It’s difficult enough for me to work past the feelings of insecurity and worthlessness to put pen to page, fingers to keyboard and try to figure out what’s in my head. I read all of these quotes about how you aren’t really a writer unless you have to, constantly, all the time, or you are so consumed by the passion of writing that you cannot function otherwise—what if you have a stringent, most deep and dark desire to be a writer, but you are paralyzed by the brokenness of your own heart?

Mental illness is a beast, and while a lot of writers suffer from it, it isn’t something we talk about if it isn’t posthumously. We don’t mention how so-and-so had to battle every day for the two words he put on the page in the entire eight hours he spent ‘writing.’ We don’t talk about how there are days when all we want to do, yearn to do is write, but all we do instead is stare at the ceiling because there is no energy, no light, no life in our minds, our hands, in that sacred space where the words come from. That place can channel your darkness, or it can eat it whole and spit back more.

I’m afraid of getting better, and I’m afraid of not getting better. What could be worse than struggling for each word, crying at night when I fail—again—to write a single sentence that day? I imagine being happy but with a piece missing, knowing there is something essential within me that I once had and will never be able to find again. If I ditch the darkness, where will the light come from?

Will I have any light at all?  One sentence at a time. One word at a time. One battle at a time, on the page, on the screen, in my mind. We’ll see.

Kristi Hébert was born near Buffalo, NY, but she now lives in a mosquito-ridden bayou jungle in Louisiana.  She works as a dog trainer, for which she didn’t need any of her three degrees.  She’s currently getting a fourth degree just for fun.  She likes to write about the end of the world, and she has been mistaken for Ariel, the Little Mermaid, at least once.  She is the Blog Editor of South85 Journal.