Anyone who has always written has always known we are not like the other kids. Many, if not most, of us can pass in polite society and even get others to pay us for our compulsion.
Harvard Neuroscientist Alice Flaherty goes to the sources of that compulsion in her new book "The Midnight Disease."
I picked up a copy by chance this morning and stopped reading a few chapters in to ... what else.. write about it.
I look at my fountain pen and ink collections displayed around my desk and know they are not that far removed from skipping lunch to deposit my lunch money in the pen/pencil or notepad machines outside of the principal's office in grade school.
Flaherty makes the case that many great (and many, many more not great) writers share a brain state called hypergraphia, a compulsive need to write.
Looking at fellow bloggers, contributors on various listserves and my own dear circle of e-correspondents, I wonder how many of us are in this boat.
In recent months, I've dealt with a variety of bizarre neurological symptoms. It says something that it didn't really bother me until my writing became scrambled... then it was an all out assault on figuring it out.
In the midst of the frustrating medical merry-go-round, I couldn't help but laugh when one neurologist explained the results of a SPECT scan that photographs actual brain activity.It was an abnormal study, he said, in a clinician's even tone, but several worst case scenarios were eliminated. "Surprisingly there was no evidence whatsoever of depression and I had expected to find quite a bit," he added.
I asked if his expectation was established because I was a writer or a middle aged woman. He didn't answer.
Poe called hypergraphia "the midnight disease" while Hippocrates called it "the sacred disease."
I'm just hoping my insurance will cover it.