Been down so long.....

It's been a rough couple of weeks and the crowning glory to it all is that I got the flu and have been laid up in a nest of blankets with all the attendant paraphernalia that accompanies being sick - flat fizzy drinks (ginger ale) and toast. Oh, and Jams as the constant companion but I think mainly because she lusts after buttered toast.
Anyblowyournoseway, it had me thinking about being artistic and being 'struck low' so to speak and so I did a time honored Google search to find out what I could on just that topic. Aside from the best known 'sickies', Frida Kahlo and Van Gogh, it seems the vast majority of us suffer from a mental illness of one sort or another.
Isn't that telling.
Now why is this gift of creativity also a bit of a curse when it comes to mental stability? Certainly we all are generally labelled as being 'different' because of our penchant for the slightly outre or even  downright odd but why would this fecund imagination seemingly have us teetering on the edge of sanity? Is it that we struggle so long and hard for recognition and have what we create from our deep soul laid bare before the many who cannot understand, that it finally leads us to just bloody give up and retreat into that comfort zone of not even trying to be present in the world and zone out......
Well, perhaps this is all rhetorical and who can really say - we know so very little about how our brain works. 
Never mind creativity.
The painting: "Valentine Gode-Darel in illness" by Ferdinand Hodler. This was the artist's lover who contracted uterine cancer after giving birth to their child.  He created a series of paintings that documented the wasting away of Valentine and her eventual death - an extremely powerful series, hard to look at and, I would expect, even harder to paint.
Talk about a soul laid bare.