Popping the Big Question to Diva

Yesterday, Diva received a gift card. It was a thank you for volunteering for Warmline (a hotline run by the local NAMI office to help people with mental illness). Did I just mention a gift card? Yep and that my friends could only mean one thing: we girls were goin’ shopping!

Hopping in the fab-mobile, we set out sights on Target. Her haul? A set of bed spreads and pillow covers (hot pink with big-ass white polka dots all over them) and a DVD set with four chick flicks -- including a heartwarming Christmas story with Linda Hamilton and Nazis. Needless to say, our next slumber party will rock! The administrator who mailed the gift card would be amazed, but send a gift card to a woman with adult attention disorder -- and this shit will happen. Girlie fun and mayhem will ensue.

As we sat munching at Taco Bell, I got my courage up and finally popped the question to Diva: would she please be my partner in blogging? This is a big step in any writer’s life. It wasn’t all about me anymore. It was all about Diva, as it should be. After all, if you are unfortunate enough to talk to me, I will find a way of turning the conversation to Diva like some Star Trek geek going on and on about Shatner. Kerry is my hero, and she doesn’t even have a starship -- yet. We just have an empire of dreams and that’s enough.

The fact that Diva has border line personality doesn’t mean she is on the boarder line of having a personality, it means she has an excess of it. She is the most beloved Minnesotan since Mary Richards. Diva is the show pony in my stable. And yes, I get the irony. Using the word “stable” in connection with either of us is damn funny.

The only other thing we had to come up with was her alias, Diva, for this blog. We had to make sure none of you freaks surfing the net in your underwear, sipping Mountain Dew, could start stalking her ass. That, from now on, is my job and my job alone.

Here are a few changes to make us better cartoons -- easier to digest for public unaccustomed to having strange people like us in their living room. Yes, Diva, I’ll wipe my feet and won’t touch their white walls. Here are the changes:


Strange Light: The True Adventures of Diva and Vincent.

This is the story of two underdog artist with mental illness, a romance with each other and with art.

I am Vincent, a writer trying to understand creativity and my own broken mind. Diva is a painter/photographer who vowed to get her college degree after surviving cancer in 2009. Together we make up the most beloved couple since Hitler and Goebbels. Welcome to our world and play nice.

Susan McKeown "Singing in the Dark, Bringing Drepression to Light"

A great article on Susan McKeown (www.susanmckeown.com) in the Spring 2010 issue of The NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Advocate (www.nami.org/miaw). (Click on article to enlarge.)

Strange Light

I was reading an article about Susan McKeown (www.susanmckeown.com) in the Spring 2010 issue of The NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Advocate (www.nami.org/miaw). Susan wanted to know about other songwriters who also suffered from depression, but her search on Amazon.com only revealed Leonard Cohen. Well, he's the one who admitted it. There are millions of others who don't want to deal with the world's meanness, misunderstanding and the whispers as they leave the room. The world has made them feel ashamed to be themselves.

I know that for a fact. I've been ashamed. I am an artist with depression, so it is possible that I am seeing this problem through my own experience and not as it is. I've been known to do that -- a lot. One thing I do know: mental illness is today's civil rights battleground. I'm not crazy. Other artists I know with mental illness aren't crazy either. They are sweet, sensitive and so alive.

I should write about them. THESE are my people, my heroes, my friends. They are me. I have pretended for too long that I am like everybody else. I have... what is the phrase? Been in denial. Been a coward. But that really hasn't worked for me. A bird makes a really crappy gopher. I must be what I really am, even if it frightens the gophers.

I know some people will never understand, but I must explain what it is like to be us. Too many people assume "mental illness" equals crazy. I must have a mental defect and a low IQ. People begin to talk slowly and in small words, so I can understand. Others say I am too sensitive, I feel too deeply. God help me the day I become insensitive. Feeling too deeply (having both mental illness and creativity) can be a curse and a gift. They are a strange light that illuminates the world in frightening and thrilling ways. Being a mentally ill artist is not for the faint of heart.

The stories that I write for Strange Light (Adventures in Mental Illness and Creativity) will not be dry, clinical, serious or painted with a fake smile. They will be funny, tragic, silly and real. Now and then, as you read them, you may mutter, "I can't believe he wrote that!" Believe it. I am out to change minds.

If you want to chime in and tell me your take, please do. I need the interaction with like minded people. You know, us crazy artists. Understand, this is just a personal view from one artist with mental illness. When I write about an artist, I am not insinuating that they too are mentally ill... or particularly creative, for that matter. In the end, I worry about pleasing the toughest critic I know: me. I simply write about what fascinates me. My essays begin and end in my own delight. They are the expression of my own rapture with the world around us and the world in my head -- that mental landscape, the inner playground where creativity is the best swing set ever.

Shine on,
Vincent Blackwood

Written July 4th 2010 (Independence Day)