She talked about Vincent van Gogh, the artist who suffered during his life from mental illness, self-medicated, was treated by doctors, and struggled to succeed despite his obvious impossible talent due to his sickness. She talked about her knowledge of his life, thanks to her art history degree, and how he sold only one painting his entire life—not because he wasn’t recognized by his community as a genius but because he struggled to even be part of a community due to his illness.

And I thought of the flying and the hard days at the word mines. I thought about the days when I heard the tornado in my head and couldn’t make the words get to my fingers. I thought about the frustration, the depression, the difficulties talking to people about what it sounded like inside my skull some days when I could barely pay attention because of the rush of words and ideas.

Hannah Gadsby told people artists don’t have to suffer for their art, and I’ll forever thank her for having the guts to stand up and say that to the world. Because I used to believe it was true.

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Don't wanna be free of hope
And I'm at the end of my rope
It's so tough just to be alive
When I feel like the living dead

I'm givin' it up so plain
I'm livin' my life in vain
And where am I going to?
I gotta really try
Try so hard to get by
And where am I going to?

Flip on your TV
And try to make sense out of that
If we were all in the movies
Maybe we wouldn't be so bored

We're givin' it up so plain
We're livin' our lives in vain
And where are we going to?
We gotta really try
Try so hard to get by
And where are we going to?

I call it burning these days because that’s what it feels like: like there’s an idea inside me burning its way out. But when I was younger, I called it flying. What I really meant was controlled falling. Like there was a tornado going on and I would leap off something and ride right through the middle of it, all the way up, chasing words. Because that’s what it felt like for me, rolling on through the manic energy that comes with being bipolar.

A lot of folks equate the manic energy of being bipolar with the creative spark that drives artists to brilliance. They point to so many great artists in history who lived with mental illness and say, “There it is, that energy, that’s what made them great!”

Except for so many artists, mental illness didn’t make them great. It made them ill. And if they weren’t careful, it made them gone.

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Being bipolar is a constant system of checks and balances. These days I fight against needing my medication adjusted a lot, against depression and anxiety, mania and hypomania. I still end up flying some days, sometimes for days at a time, because as time goes on, the body changes and you have to adjust to new needs, new doses, new medication.

Coping mechanisms change, life situations go ways you never expected, mania and depression rear their ugly heads. But the day I went on medication was one of the greatest days of my life, because it was the day my creative spark stopped becoming an excuse to keep putting up with an illness that was killing me.

DISABILITY VISIBILITY: FIRST PERSON STORIES FROM THE 21ST CENTURY