When I was 22, I had a breakdown, attempted suicide, was diagnosed with PTSD and OCD and ended up inpatient for a bit, then in an intensive outpatient program. During the program I was told someday I would "recover and live a normal life again", and at our clinic's "clubhouse" there was a poster on the wall of the names of famous people who had some form of mental illness, which was meant to be inspiring. Of course, a lot of those people on the wall took their own lives, or eventually years later would die of suicide or a drug overdose, and many of them still living have had a diminished quality of life.
Mental illness in creative people tends to be particularly misunderstood. In one school of thought you have people who treat it as a superpower and act like any attempts to suffer less through meds/weed/psychedelics/therapy is ableist and a copout. In another school of thought you have people who turn us all into tragic, pitiable figures and think that our mental illness robs us of our creativity or if we do get medicated and lose our ability/motivation to create things due to the side effects, well too bad that's an acceptable sacrifice to "keep us alive" [even though some creative people who have taken their own lives in fact commented on suffering greatly from the loss of creativity and that contributed heavily to why they committed suicide despite being in treatment].
I not only do not experience my own mental illnesses as a superpower, but contrary to the "you will someday live a full, normal life" lies I heard during my early days of treatment, for decades it has deeply impeded my ability to function, have relationships, and so on. And yes, there are days when I am too depressed or anxious to write even though writing helps, however, I still manage to do creative things at least some of the time despite my mental illness, so I think it's safe to say the truth is somewhere between the extreme viewpoints of "mental illness is a superpower for creativity" and "mental illness destroys creativity".
One of the names that stood out to me on the list of famous people with mental illness was Vincent Van Gogh. My favorite painting of his, The Starry Night, was also the one painting he made in an asylum, depicting the view from his window plus an imaginary village. I not only appreciate this painting aesthetically with its wild night sky and intense colors, but I appreciate it symbolically. Rather than romanticizing his mental illness - or mine - I see this work as the ability to do what one can with what one has, "carrying the fire" even in very dark places.
When I was in my mid-thirties, and about nine months out from leaving years of DV, I saw the night sky without light pollution for the first time in my life; the Milky Way was clearly visible. It made me a sobbing, incoherent mess, glad that I'd stayed alive, despite all of the trauma. It was one of the very few moments where I felt the sort of awe-inspiring benevolent energy and interconnectedness that tends to be reported with use of psychedelics, but I was sober at the moment.
Flash forward to my forties: 2022-2023 was a difficult, challenging year that broke me mentally and physically, and I found myself wanting to convert to Judaism, after feeling drawn to it off and on for years but mistakenly believing it was completely closed to me due to my queerness. As the urge to convert kept coming back, I found myself fixating on two things: the painting Starry Night by Van Gogh, and the song "Im Nin'Alu" by Ofra Haza - a song I'd first heard a snippet of back on MTV AMP back in the 1990s, and affected me so profoundly that in the mid-late 00s I still remembered it as being one of the most amazing things I'd ever heard and looked for the full version on YouTube and it became one of my favorite songs. No matter how many times I've listened to Ofra Haza singing it, I get chills and tears come to my eyes [which makes it one of my go-tos for hitbodedut, the Jewish version of screaming into the void]. In 2023 I finally looked up the lyrics, and the statement of "If there be no mercy left in the world, the doors of heaven will never be barred" resonated with me, as broken as I felt. In my mind's eye, as I read those words, as I felt them, I saw the clear night sky - not idolatry, but a metaphor.
In the Mourner's Kaddish, we praise and magnify Hashem, not because of toxic positivity, but to remind us the mourners that there is still good in the world, and also I've heard it explained this is a form of comforting G-d as well because the Divine light is diminished with the life lost. Indeed, it is customary for some Jews to address each other in writing with N"Y [an abbreviation for nehro/nehrah yair "his/her candle should burn bright"].
So Starry Night took on a deeper meaning for me: I survived A Lot to see the sea of stars, not just wonderful in and of itself but a reminder of the light of each soul, a reminder that no matter how dark and painful our lives, we are each precious and beautiful, burning brightly. I consider the human imagination to be one of the greatest gifts from G-d; sometimes people with trauma/other issues are encouraged to create a mental image of a "happy place" that they can visualize when having a hard time, and the surreal wild night sky, which does not exist on this Earth, is one of my "happy places" - "if there be no mercy left in the world, the doors of heaven will never be barred" - there are other worlds than these; sometimes I can go there in my mind and come back with beautiful things to share with others, something soothing and comforting. Little lights born from the darkness.