Authenticity

So here's the problem: 

The guy who writes this page is a good writer, a really good writer, maybe ever a great one. If he ever finished a book, people might be really impressed with what he does. He happens to also be a really smart guy who is extremely modest..., and so he hears from most, great company, always ready to make himself vulnerable, loyal to a fault, solicitous to the welfare of those for whom he cares, in spite of his physical ailments a 6'5 adonis, and does his admittedly mediocre best to be reliable in action. 

He's also a little crazy. 

He's no fool, he knows what's going on, but he's also not a model of balance. He's not nearly as crazy as he seems from description, but also crazier. He could try to conceal the extent of it for more than a short term, but if he did, it wouldn't be true to himself, and he'd lose a lot of the authenticity people find most appealing about him, not to mention; 50% of his best writing. 

He writes in the hope that the daemon (demon?) on the page is exorcized, so that he is free to live his personal life with the appearance of a (not particularly) normal person. Some people just have to be creative, and unfortunately it takes precedence over just about everything else in life, because if they do not sacrifice themselves to creating things, the creative urge devours them, and the mind creates situations that sail over its own resistance, even of people with great capacity for rationality. Over the years he's learned a few things about keeping this pack of hounds at bay: the usual psychiatric things of course, but also an extremely steady appetite for learning. The more actively the brain is learning other things, the less actively the brain works against itself.  

In terms of craziness, he's probably an 8 out of 10, maybe a 7.7 at this point. Going from 9 to 8 was extremely hard-won, and he'll exert continual effort to lower that number for the rest of his life. In terms of difficulty, at this point in his life, he's probably a 5.25: no pushover but also a person who goes along to get along and lives by a near-religious belief in the importance of compromise, and over the years the trajectory of his number has gone steadily downward. Recent relationships have been a bit stunned by how easy he is to get along with. 

No matter what people aspire to be, they have to be themselves, but they can't simply present themselves exactly as they are on the first interaction. That would be still greater madness than any he already knows, and no matter what is discovered afterward, it would be a terrible imposition to admit to a complex situation as a first interaction. One can allude to it, but one can't simply tell it. 

Some people manage to conceal truths over a lifetime, but the concealment comes at horrific personal cost of suffering and fear, what could possibly make that worthwhile?

He has learned to hope over the years, not because he's put any great store in hope, but because life has no improvement without the practice of hope, and over the years his hopes have borne out some improvements. 

He still doesn't have much audience, though he does have at least a couple dozen devoted readers. He's a little terrified of the concentration and distraction it requires to do serious publicity, but he writes in the hope that he can hold out hope to others in the still darker situations which he, like all of us, fear are imminent for us all. He's accumulated a lot of experience over the years, joy as well as suffering, fun as well as humiliation, courage as well as fear, hope as well as depression. What matters to him, what matters to us all, is the affirming flame, the importance of using the voice one is given as a call to our better angels. 

He tells his own story not for his own masturbatory arrogance (or so he hopes), he hopes that by telling his own, he is in fact telling a story of his time, his place, of people like him, even of people who aren't. He's writing about themes common to us all: loneliness and community, suffering and joy, history and the future. Every writer needs an address, a camera through which they perceive the wider world. This camera just happened to be the one at hand. You work with the material you have. This is, for the moment, his best camera, though he hopes to improve some of the others before too long. 

He would like to get away from provocative political prognostications, which have gotten him far too easy an audience (such as it is), and get to those things people really care about. The soul-feeding place from where people can derive the inspiration to keep going. 

It's a journey. Slowly but surely, he's getting there. As an artist, whatever that means, and far more importantly, as a human. He is not obligated to complete the work, but nor is he free to abandon it, and whenever the darkness deepens and helpers fail (whomever they may be), he will abide.