It's deep in the middle of the night, and I was woken up by a churning stomach and a mind that doesn't know when to quit and just let a body sleep. Whenever I spend a lot of time in one particular activity, that activity is liable to take captive both my conscious and unconscious mind for the duration. What this usually means is that during the day my mind constantly turns to whatever it is that's preoccupying me and probes and refines my ideas. Unfortunately, the mirror of this is that it all comes back to haunt me during my sleeping hours; I experience a state of half-sleep-half-dream in which my unconscious mind sets me some sort of problem, related to whatever it is that's taking up all my time; a problem that my unconscious mind thinks must be solved before I can fall fully asleep.

It's the middle of the night, so I'm probably not explaining this as clearly as I would in the light of the day. Some examples are called for. Take bridge. I used to play a lot of duplicate bridge, both in bridge clubs, and in tournaments. Sometimes these tournaments were pretty darned intensive. I remember the first time I went to Seattle was to go to the Winter Nationals. This was, oh, about six years or so ago. It was freezing cold in Seattle, and I stayed, with my bridge partner friend Steven, in a motel in the tourists' no-mans land between the Space Needle and Capitol Hill.

The first day, we played thirteen hours of bridge! Right until the wee hours, because we did well, and came third in a knock-out competition. But thirteen hours of bridge gets you into a thinking groove, and, as I lay in the next bed over from Steve in our motel that night, I spent hours in that half-sleep state, trying to solve some insoluble bridge problem. Around four, something must have brought me fully to the surface, and I realized that this bridge problem was all in my head, and couldn't be solved, and that I should just quit and let myself get some sleep.

I was exhausted through the rest of the tournament. It didn't stop me from going out on the town Saturday night, where I met this absolutely gorgeous young guy with whom I spent the night. But that's another story.

The activity that's woken me up after a similar half-sleep state tonight is, of course, film-making. I spent most of today finishing the camerawork on the personal short movie I've been making for the past three weeks. What woke me up just now was the formation of a great new idea for another short movie. I hastily switched the light on, and grabbed pen and paper to scribble the ideas down in case my daytime mind should have forgetten them by the morning. Maybe now that my mind's vomited that stuff out, I'll be able to sleep.

The turn that I've taken this year - the discovery that I'm strongly motivated to make a fool of myself by making very personal movies and letting people see them - it's one of the most important discoveries of my adult life. I use the term "making a fool of myself" purposefully, because I think true creativity comes when you're willing to let people see your ideas. And it's the fear of making a fool of yourself that holds you back. For a few years, I lost that internal drive towards creativity. I became just a worker bee. It was mainly through this website that I started to wake up my creative side again.

So I'm excited, and quite hopeful. Which makes me all the more anxious and worried about what holds me back. My old friends fatigue and depression. For weeks now, I've been deeply tired almost every day by mid-afternoon. Not so much bodily fatigued, but fatigued in my eyes, to the point where it's almost painful to keep them open. I don't know if that's also why I've been experiencing depression once more. Even if that's not why the depression has returned to veil the edges of my mind, the double whammy of those two factors - the depression and the fatigue - along side my eagerness to make movies, sets up an odd competition. Which will win? My creative drive or the forces of the mind and body that try to hold me back?

The view this morning after the storm