It's been a while since I found myself able to write anything on this post, but I won't apologise for the absence. Why? Not because I don't care about my readers or this blog, but because there were major personal things going on that made it impossible for me to continue like usual. 

January has never been a strong month for me. I remember I always ascribed it to tests and looming mid-term grades when I was in school. Then, when I was in university, January was exam season, so it certainly wasn't the best month to be alive. 
However, with university and school wrapped up, I still found myself more vulnerable to depressive episodes during this dark month of the year. Every year I am hit by a melancholia that usually holds a firm grip until the first flowers bud in March, unable to shake off the fatigue. 

This year was particularly difficult, as I suffered from a rather sever bout of depression just before Christmas. I don't want to go too deeply into the details, but I have been reflecting on depression and read a lot about it, as well as consulted my favourite biographies of people who inspire me. Many of them are writers and I couldn't help noticing that depression and writing - in general, depression and creativity - seem to go hand in hand very often. Now, that's barely ground-breaking, there is plenty of research that indicates so. Among some of the contemporary authors who suffered from mental problems are J.K. Rowling, Marian Keyes, Stephen King, Cecelia Ahern, Isabel Allende, Philip Roth and the list goes on and on - and those are only writers of today, not including Sylvia Plath, Tennessee Williams, Enid Blyton, Virginia Woolf, and so on and so forth.