Creative Darkness?

Last post I touched on, (very briefly) the fact that when I am down, I am more creative. In many cases, of unique and amazing talent (not saying I have any of that, I'm just talking about others) the creators of amazing pieces were depressed. Many famous people in the past, artists, writers and even some musicians are depressed. One particular person that springs into my head is Edgar Allen Poe. He wrote some really dark stuff, and yes he wasn't happiest person all the time.

When I am down, depressed, in my 'dark' place, I am more creative. I'm not sure why this is, I have one main theory though.
When I am down, I am not hiding. I am not behind a mask, I am not trying to control my emotions by not slipping down into the darkness. I am not trying to hide from anything. When I am that dark that I have a muse, I don't feel pain or anything.
Now the really weird thing about this theory is it goes against my one about the layers of the darkness.

You see I told you that when I go through the sadness, then the pain and then the deepest darkness, I feel empty, and numb. No emotions. But it appears that if I go into it with a strong enough emotion to start with, if I can hang on to the pain as I pass through it, or the sadness or anger that sent me there in the first place, I can usually get my muse working enough to write something.
However there is a major side effect of this. I'm usually down or angry or hurting to go there in the first place, so my writing isn't happy happy. It's rarely ever happy happy. Mostly it's death, insanity, pain, loss, heartbreak, suicide, all that jazz. My drawings are similar, although often both forms of my expression tend to be a little more abstract.

And finally, the really bad see-saw effect is this:
I have no muse when I am happy. I cannot write a love poem, or a story about a girl who got her dreams in the end because I never have a muse for those emotions. The girl would end up dead after cutting her own wrists in the snow, and the love poem would turn out to be heartbreak and loss. So I tend to walk a balancing act between being as normal as I can be, and being creative. To be creative I have to force myself downwards, into a downwards spiral that turns into a fall to the deepest depths of my despair. I'm honestly not kidding. The darker I am, the worse off my mind is, the better I am at being creative. So this leads to the chicken-egg moment of "Am I depressed because that makes me creative? Or am I creative because I am depressed?" I tend to think of it as a little of both.
I walk a balancing act between darkness and light, creative and bland works.

And don't you just love when you have to destroy yourself to create?

Suddenly-not-as-good-as-she-was
Samantha.