It seems incongruent that depression has played such a major role in the discovery of my creativity. Having recently discovered my inner artist, I was delighted to come across Artesian Magazine and immediately set about preparing my pictures and words for submission. In trying to condense a description of myself and my artwork, I discovered that it was part of my ongoing process to heal the split between world-weariness and inner fire. Reflecting on this paradox has consumed most of my life. Even as a child, I was constantly plagued by the question 'what's it all about?', and haunted by the feeling 'this isn't it'. The gap between what I felt inside and what I was experiencing absorbed an enormous amount of my time and energy, no matter what distractions or self-medications I experienced or tried. I truly felt at times that death would be the only peace I would find.

The self-imposed task of healing the split began in primary school with a project on pyramids, and throughout my teens expanded to include the world religions, mysticism, symbolism, esoteric studies, the brain, good health for the mind, body and soul - you name it, I studied it. Books were my first passion, escape and survival tool, one of my most positive obsessions, which helped immensely in my search for what life is all about. I taught myself astrology and amassed a great number of files, which all in all, were my antidotes to depression. I compiled one specifically for the times when the black hole claimed me, which I would work through and add to when the feelings of doom threatened to overwhelm me. It was comprised of holistic health tips, common-sense advice for keeping grounded and stable, feel-good stories, inspirational quotes and newspaper or magazine clippings which made me smile or touched me in some way.

Although I can justify much of my depression with stories of my life, it went much further than that, I felt utterly confused at my inability to translate my passion and awe for life into my daily heaviness. Many nights I would counteract suicidal fantasies by imagining what people would recount of me after I was gone, which made me count my blessings for the amazing connections I had with so many people. I'd try to set myself up with visualisations and good intent for the following day, and wake up in an invisible, suffocatingly heavy, body-mind armour, feeling I couldn't face another day. Year after year, trying one thing after another, the only way I could move through it was to absorb myself in whatever worked for the time that it worked. In my many diaries and dream journals, the running themes were of huge peaks and valleys, a healthy sense of self, particularly in regard to relationships, coupled with intense desire to be more 'spiritual'. For many years I thought the price to pay for the highs were the lows, and the middle path was for those born to it and probably paid for with dullness.

I kept my depression to myself, although I sought medical and psychological help, and only revealed it in later years where I felt it was appropriate. The shocked response of the other showed how well I could conceal the depression under a larger-than-life persona. Of course I became expert at spotting the hidden pain of others, and believed this to be the main purpose of my depression, to help others reveal and deal with theirs. More than one person told me I had caught them just at the right time, and that feeling heard and understood had helped them to turn their life around. I learned that everyone experiences depression in a variety of ways. Some feel grief, sadness, anxiety, panic, fear, hopelessness, worthlessness or great detachment from the world around them. Personally, I felt exhausted with inner and outer heaviness, a nagging desire for deep darkness and the silence of night, sleep and often death. Earth didn't feel like my home, I felt like a soft stranger in a harsh alien land. I identified with an analogy I read somewhere about how in spirit we are laughing with our friends on a boat in the sunshine and volunteer to go down to a shipwreck on the sea bed to retrieve some necessary treasure. So we don our wetsuit and breathing apparatus and descend the ocean, but pretty soon it gets darker, we're battling with cross-currents, trying to avoid would-be predators, whilst feeling more and more weighted and pressured. By the time we reach our destination we've no idea of who we are, why we're there, or even the fact that we are wearing a wet suit! That's how I felt, like I had some distant memory of where I'd come from and the purpose of the visit, but somehow I'd failed, I was lost, reading books about the unlost, wishing I was one of them...

I tried to face my pain, and would scare myself with guttural crying that seemed way beyond any memories or pain stemming from my own childhood hurts. Attempting to move my focus from 'monkey mind' and raw emotions, I struggled with my own koans such as: 'Is pain fundamental to the Universe?' whilst trying not to become too fascinated with my own mental and emotional processing... My instinct was to submerge myself in metaphysical works, which would stretch me beyond my personal world. I found it easy to see how life is so intricate, so fragile, so unbelievable, how everything is so beautifully interconnected from the cells in our bodies to the galaxies in our cosmos, and how the more we study anything, the more we realize how little we can know of it, and feel the wonder of how any of it exists at all! Yet still, I could not crack the code which would enable me to open my eyes in the morning with zest for the day!

My greatest fear was that depression would be the most consistent factor in my life, and so I worked hard to 'produce' something positive out of my darkness. Apart from my study projects, I wrote poetry and prose, short stories and even an 18 chapter fictional book, and put a massive amount of energy into my David Bowie collection. From the moment I saw him performing 'Starman' on TV, I was fascinated by him. Lying on the floor doing my homework, I heard 'There's a Starman waiting in the skies, he'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'd blow our minds' When I looked up and saw this red spiky-haired alien in a multi-coloured snakeskin bodysuit, something just clicked, somehow he represented 'home', and provided me with a focus to model myself on. Not only did I adopt the hair, make-up and clothes, I identified with his belief systems and devoured all angles of his soul-searching in parallel with my own. In the 70's his message was to leave your school or work day behind you, dress up, portray some of the inner characters we all carry inside of ourselves, walk it out and see what revelations you're left with... move outside of the confines of gender and societal roles to see what else you're made of and get your own take on life. We shared an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and esoteric studies, and I read up on anyone he showed interest in. I met a lot of like-minded people at conventions and gatherings, and even learned skills that might get me near him, like make-up and sound engineering. I wrote three books about him, his life and lyrics, and collected pictures, posters, books, records, memorabilia, and compiled numerous scrapbooks. The great ending to the Bowie collection was that in later years I sold it to get the money for a spiritual retreat in Switzerland with a wonderful Native American Shaman, a Tibetan Lama who oozed kindness and wisdom from every pore, and some Lakota Sioux Indians who shared with us their ceremonies and sacred teachings. And just as accumulating the collection took years of work and energy, but paid off in a way I could not have foreseen, so I feel with the depression. I found my own way to become a spirited human being, safe in my body, not clambering to be out of it. I still research, I still use astrology and immerse myself in healing tools and metaphysical studies, but now it's because it's useful and I enjoy it. I'm not searching for any ultimate universal answer anymore. I'm trying to be me, in my life as I find it, living it the way I'd wish I'd lived it if I were on my deathbed. My introduction to drawing came after receiving a healing. I had invited the healer to do a workshop with a women's group I ran to help raise awareness of natural therapies and holistic ways of living life. During the treatment I began to cry painfully. All I could verbalise was that I felt utterly alone at a core level. The frustration I felt encouraged me to try to draw a visual representation of the part of me that was beyond the depression, and the result was so satisfying (see drawing Soul Star) that soon afterwards I used the same process for things like accessing more energy, or to bring me messages from the parts of myself which I found hard to access by other means. I would put these drawings up on my wall and drink in their stories over time. I found this very therapeutic, and soon began making them into cards because of the interest friends, family and visitors took in them.

I have no professional knowledge of depression. What you read here is what I have learned from my experiences of depression, roughly spanning a 15-year period. One thing became obvious to me ­ we cannot know another's story. It remains just that, because we only know what we know from the vantage of our own viewpoint.

Society loves 'go-getters' ­ even if this is due to a manic state of mental health. Depressed people are put automatically into the role of outsider or undesirable. Therefore times when we naturally need to do inner work are not acknowledged in our society; we learn very young to mask our true feelings, and this causes us stress, tension, confusion and pain. This is why we can feel so false, empty, split and alone. Mapping my journey through depression, I had to continually re-assess myself and discover what made me feel good, what gave my life meaning, what totally absorbed me and united my mind and heart in such a way that I was not suffering the awareness of a painful division within.

I haven't been in that black hole for many years now, although I have had difficulties, down periods and grieved the death of two of my partners. My feeling is that a strong sense of our own goodness goes a tremendous way to connecting to the goodness inherent in life. Let's be real ­ life is not pain-free. We don't know what life is, so we have to find the best way we can of being here now; there's no way out but there is a way in. Everything you need is behind the eyes reading these words and not one being on this planet can be that being but you. Your light is inside you, all you have to do is shine it on your shadows, clean up what you can, and then radiate what goodness you have to help illuminate the same to others. By becoming a living example, by following what is in your heart, you show the way for others to follow with courage what is in their own heart. What could be more creative than that? In the words of the wise, follow your bliss…