Listen, Everyone.  Please Take Your Medication.

This piece by Amanda Mull is important. Two excerpts:

Now, in apparently quitting his psychiatric medication for the sake of his creativity, West is promoting one of mental health’s most persistent and dangerous myths: that suffering is necessary for great art.

Esmé Weijun Wang, a novelist who has written about living with schizoaffective disorder, has experienced that reality firsthand. “It may be true that mental illness has given me insights with which to work, creatively speaking, but it’s also made me too sick to use that creativity,” she says. “The voice in my head that says ‘Die, die, die’ is not a voice that encourages putting together a short story.”

Take your medicine. Work with a behaviorist.  Get your shit done.  You can do it.

Medicine does not blunt the tools.  It frees you up to actually use them.

Acceptance and Rejection on April Fool’s Day/Palm Sunday

Yesterday, I got two or three rejection emails for short stories I’m trying to place.  On Facebook, I asked my writer friends if there was any chance those mags were having some April Fool’s Day fun with us.  Truth be told, I don’t take rejections seriously or personally.  The stories have been through the processes they’ve needed to go through before I sent them out.  I love them and believe in them.  I know they’ll find a place in the world.

Then I got to thinking about how I might have felt if I’d gotten acceptance letters yesterday instead.  There’s a certain foreboding, isn’t there, in Palm Sunday adulation?