Writing and music and drugs have this common thread, a common effect on mental ailment: a sort of balancing effort that either adds to something that is missing or takes away from that which is too much. The difference is the origin of cause; you have physical causes that eventually manifest mental change, and you have activities that go right to the mental and cause the change first-hand (the usually healthier ones, but it depends).
You have your narcotics that dull the throbbing, and the head trips that suspend you from reality and the accompanying anxiety, and then there are the emetics that basically purge that vile buildup that can't be knocked loose. And like the physical drugs, the mental activities have different effects on different people.
For me, writing (cathartic writing anyway) is an emetic. It is as if putting down the words is removing something that actually has weight from the mind itself.
At the time it feels very good to be rid of the poison, but unfortunately when one looks over the expenditure the next day it looks exactly like its nature: a waste dump. One flushes their vomit because it generally invokes revulsion, and sometimes these words appear just like that material.
But these words I can't seem to flush. I can't get rid of it because unlike vomit there remains these semantics in the words that are somehow sticking together and building up and sometimes when I feel I am losing my mind I look over it again and it fills in those missing pieces and puts me level again and re-coalesces this patchwork belief system that I am starting to acquire. I lose it sometimes, as if it is sliding back into the murk, but upon refreshing it, the system re-suspends, however fragile, and that is something I cannot do without.
