By: Darrelyn L. Tutt

Agatha Christie. Winston Churchill. Samuel Clemens. Calvin Coolidge. Abraham Lincoln.  Charles Dickens. Karen Blixen. Georgia O'Keeffe. Virginia Woolf. Vincent Van Gogh. Ernest Hemingway. Michelangelo. Isaac Newton. Edgar Allen Poe.
We know these individuals to be extraordinary individuals and artists:
Prolific writers, extraordinary painters, exceptional leaders, inspiring actors, deep thinkers, and intense "feelers."
The curious and painful commonality that bridges these "high-bred" individuals to one another is not only their extraordinary giftedness and creativity but the difficult denominator called depression as well. Each of these notable individuals fought an intense battle and struggled with ongoing bouts of depression throughout their lives.
Some committed suicide and of those who didn't,
each contemplated it at some point.
-President Lincoln spoke of suicide on numerous occasions and fought clinicial depression his entire life. "His meloncholy dripped from him as he walked," said law partner William Herndon.
-In the process of making the greatest scientific discoveries in the world, Isaac Newton suffered with severe manic depression and experienced such profound mood swings that he escaped into isolated environments to try and relieve himself of his anxiety, fear, and desperation.
-Virginia Woolf suffered a severe mental breakdown before every novel she completed. In 1941, the breakdown turned unalterably tragic and she took her own life.
An artist's ability to feel and experience his environment is keen, acute, and intense and this is what makes them such extraordinary, powerful, and provoking communicators. An artist has the gift to express outwardly what we all experience and identify with inwardly to some degree.
It's really quite extraordinary.
Appreciate the virtue of the arts and the value of great minds but don't neglect the weighty and painful realities that accompanied these individuals in the process.
This is an education unto itself and lends a great service to us if we take time to read, view, and experience the "whole" man and not just the part that appears exceptional, provoking, and qualifying.
Brilliant. Beautiful. Extraordinary. Painful. Confusing. Complex. Mind-boggling.
A mixed and mingled bag of strewn emotion at the core and intertwined with the minds of great men.
Virtues attend with trials of their own, no gift or man preventing.
Read the man between the lines ...
and see the whole.
Who do "you" best identify with?