As I write this we are approaching the five-year anniversary of the biggest disaster ever to impact this country, the September 11 terrorist attack that changed the world forever. It’s another five-year anniversary for me, as I had an experience in late July/early August 2001 that was a turning point in my life and one that my close friends and family refer to as my “wigging out.”  I know it to be the moment when I made the transition from a person who had been running from her own creative identity to one that confidently and completely self-identifies as an artist. It took me a bit longer to add writer to that identification, but I have never denied my artist self since that experience.

It could have turned out very differently, however. While I was working through what was a very intense metamorphosis, a series of events combined with an inaccurate mental health diagnosis by a trusted physician found me in a very vulnerable situation. The final outcome could have been my spending the rest of my life in despair and on the wrong drugs for a condition I do not have. I was diagnosed as manic and put on a psychotropic drug at the very moment when I was reaching for the most deeply buried part of my self that had been trying to emerge for most of my adult life. Fortunately, I have friends and family who surrounded me and gently but firmly held onto me until this crisis passed.

It was like a birth, in a way. Like any birth, there are forces at work that have to violently push aside and tear open the comfortable secure environment in which the newborn had been, and the world outside that womb or egg shell is dizzyingly strange, new and surreal at first. In my case, I’d tried this birth a few times before, and rejected it and returned to the safety of the womb of denial where I couldn’t be hurt by any sort of failure. I’d started out to become an artist in high school, and was encouraged by my parents, but after my mother died and my father went bankrupt, I found myself unable to follow those dreams. I remember that for many years my emotional life was too dark to try to paint what I felt – I would just claim that to be an artist you have to have something to say, and that I just didn’t have anything I wanted to express.

I did write all that time, keeping a journal ever since almost the first time I boarded an airplane as a flight attendant, the job I chose instead of art school. I wrote in hotels looking out the window, in restaurants where waitresses would be kind enough to keep bringing me coffee, in parks and airport crew lounges. I wrote instead of going to movies, instead of reading novels and instead of building friendships. I lived a nomadic life – when I married I had a husband who was promoted and transferred every year and for the first years of our marriage I kept a journal, trying to record my feelings but also trying to understand my complex family, a tumultuous marriage and the enormous pain I was trying to keep at bay.

Part of what was so difficult to sort through was the numbing loss of my mother, coupled with the loss of self-esteem of my father, who had gone rapidly from a man who was the center of his home town, a well loved public person content with his place in society, to a man destitute and destroyed, widowed and then divorced, struggling with alcoholism and at times even homeless. This downward spiral I now understand had less to do with the financial aspect of my mother’s death and more to do with my father’s own identity – there were definitely some deep seated wounds he was running from, pain he could not bear, and because this pain had been present all his life it permeated the experiences we had as a family.

It needs to be noted that this was a time before Oprah, and before we as a culture had learned to openly communicate with one another. As a flight attendant I spent hours in different major cities, often in a bookstore searching the titles for something that would help me understand. There were many: Passages, by Gail Sheehy, I’m Ok, You’re OK, What Color is Your Parachute?, and oddly enough, The Prince of Tides. From that book I became aware that families could have such unspeakable pain that they could hide that pain and its truth even from themselves.

In order to understand my father, though, I had to first understand my grandmother. This was a much more complex issue. Reading Rosalind Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers helped me realize that there was a separate and distinct story going on with each of these family members, and in my mind I began to separate them out and write about them as though there were chapters in my life story. I wondered how to piece this puzzle together in a way that would make sense for me and for those others in the family that were trying to understand how it all came unglued.

One of those was my stepmother, my father’s second wife. She never could really understand how their marriage fell apart so quickly. My step-sisters surely were affected deeply by the loss of the only father they ever knew. When my father moved to Costa Rica and married a woman my age with two sons I inherited another step-mother and set of step-brothers, who not only didn’t understand my father, they didn’t even understand the culture he came from. In my writing and my art I have tried to address some of these issues. I’ve been successful at telling some of these stories, and some still have to be told.

So here I am at the five year anniversary of my becoming an artist/writer. I’m finally holding that bachelor’s degree in studio art that I set out to attain thirty years earlier, and I’ll soon have a master’s degree in English to boot. I’ve become so comfortable identifying myself as an artist/writer that I find it strange that I once could not say those words, even to myself. Recently I had dinner with my father’s sister ast a restaurant where sixteen of my paintings were hanging and had the pleasure of hearing her tell our dinner companion that “Susan is a writer, too.” What a thrill to have your own family proudly claim your dreams as facts.

It might have been otherwise. When I shared with my doctor the photos of my paintings I’d recently completed for my first painting class, he wrote “grandiose ideas” on the chart and proceeded to explain to me that I was manic, and that if I didn’t follow his advice I’d become psychotic. I did believe him for a while, because I was going through that metamorphosis and in addition to the excitement and stress of trying to present the entire group of paintings from the semester at my first “critique” of my work, I’d also had to sit outside in 100 degree heat waiting my turn, and I’d forgotten to take my Zoloft that morning. I’m convinced that my hormones were out of kilter as well, and there were other factors – the financial stress of a landlord threatening to sell the property where I lived, and the physical stress of driving 30 miles each way to school each day to class.

This entire episode will forever be linked in my mind to a movie, Moulin Rouge. This professor had given us a final assignment to go see this movie and create two paintings in response to it. I have not been a movie-goer, and this was quite a visual experience for me, but I did manage to create two paintings that were strange and colorful, abstract statements of the visual impact that Moulin Rouge had for me, and I have had people tell me that seeing that movie would be enough to cause some sort of mental vertigo. I’m not sure that was the case, but that movie will always remind me of that bizarre experience.

I knew I was in trouble when I started crying on the way home from the painting critique. I was crying with joy, and I remember calling up people that had supported me and saying “I made it!” I could finally call myself an artist. Less than two days later this doctor was writing down “grandiose ideas” and I was beginning to doubt myself already. He had prescribed zyprexa, which is a powerful psychotropic drug, and when I took it I began to hear voices and was convinced I might die. My family was frightened for me, and my friends were so concerned that one of them came and spent the night with me. One of my sons told the other one that “Mom’s cracking up!”

Thankfully, that was not the case. After a few visits with a psychiatrist and a wonderful new gynecologist, I was back to myself, with the help of a new combination of medication for my ADD and one for hormone replacement. I rejected the diagnosis of mania, refused to take the Zyprexa and went back to a combination of Wellbutrin and Zoloft, which has served me well for five years. I don’t even take the Zoloft anymore and am currently not taking the hormone replacement either. I’ll never go a day without Wellbutrin or something similar for the distractibility, disorganization and distemper of my lifetime struggle with attention deficit disorder.

The larger story is that I’ve only been able to effect lasting change in my life with the help of medication, and that it’s common for untreated ADD to be misdiagnosed as manic/depressive or bipolar illness. Most likely, had he lived at a later time, my father would have been able to benefit from an antidepressant as well. No one who knew him would refute an ADD diagnosis if they thought about his personality and “effervescence”, as he might have put it.

While a diagnosis of ADD is not one that is made easily, the overriding inability to either focus on what you need to pay attention to or keep from focusing on what you might tend to dwell on are key symptoms. Perhaps he might have followed his childhood dream of a career in journalism or at least he might have seen his poetry published. I’m certain that if my father had realized his own ADD he would have had a different sense of himself. His mother’s dismissal of anyone who could not earn a respectable living as a “ne’er do well” haunted him his entire life.

 He left the town where he was loved and would surely have been forgiven for his failures in time, and completely cut himself off from those that loved him. Certainly he would have been able to overcome feelings of overwhelming failure and loss without resorting to the extreme measures he chose to put the past behind him. His last years were spent in Costa Rica reclaiming some sense of community as he fought the cancer that killed him.

 My own self-identification of ADD was confirmed by tests and counseling during the year my father died, the same year I returned to college for the first time, pursing a business degree instead of the art degree I ultimately sought. I was able to excel in areas I’d never dreamed possible before. Slowly my sense of who and what I was began to change. Nearly nine years ago I returned to my home town to face the past with all its pain and confusion.

Much of this story has been told since then in the many non-fiction pieces I’ve written and the narrative paintings I’ve done. Since then I’ve been able to teach others how to conquer those demons and find their muse, hold onto it and give it a voice. I’ll continue to grow as an artist, and I’m certain that there will be fallow times as well as times when I’m bursting with creative energy.

I’m sure I’m not done with this adventure, but I’m sure of one thing – I long ago passed a point of no return. An artist and a writer, I’ve since realized, isn’t all that rare a combination. It is just that our culture doesn’t have a word for that duality of talents – so I call it being doublygifted. Arrogant, yes – but a little audacity is a good thing. I can’t take credit for that term, either. I found a book by that title many years ago at the beginning of this trek, a beautiful book of the drawings and paintings that had been done by famous writers. I have treasured that book and wondered often about other writer/artists that struggle with a dual gift.

It seems that in this multimedia world there ought to be a third dimension, a crossover category in academia for those who wish to be “certified” in both areas. Many have found the web to be the perfect media for that confirmation, and since 2003 I have been one of those who write what was first termed a weblog. My blog, Doublygifted, was launched as a personal site where I write stories, make observations about the current world as I see it, and share paintings I am working on or photographs of my world. It isn’t something I promote, and I really never know if anyone reads it, but I find it the perfect place to offer my creations. It has been a confessional, a soapbox, a place for temper tantrums and tender goodbyes, and a testing ground for many of my stories.

          When I first returned home I spent a good bit of time on the city pier, watching the people and sketching. One day a child came up to me and watched me draw for a while, and then he looked at me and asked “Are you an artist?” I don’t know, I answered, “Do you think I am?” “Yes,” he said, and scurried off. “Well, then, I guess I am an artist” I said softly to myself. A few years later some children were in my living room scooping up Halloween candy, and one of them saw the antique typewriters I collect. Big eyed, he asked “Are you a writer?” Yes, I laughed. I suppose I am.  Whatever name I call it, it’s good finally to be comfortable in my own