My brother has been a professional musician for over 30 years. He's first oboeist in a medium-sized orchestra, and makes a pittance for a job that could be described as full-time. He teaches on the side (oboe teachers are rare: the first thing he asks them is, "Do you have a burning desire to play the oboe?"), makes oboe reeds and repairs instruments, and studied accounting so he could supplement his meagre earnings. His wife is a flautist who also teaches, but who had to study to be a dental hygienist to make ends meet. Both of them work incredibly hard, all the time. Music isn't their "passion". They aren't "doing what they love". They are doing what their minds and souls are wired to do. They are musicians. There is no shame in working all those extra jobs to support what they must do to be whole. But it is an awful lot of very hard work. The arts are considered bottom priority for the most part,and it's likely to stay that way. Musicians (and actors and writers and dancers and sculptors) must adjust themselves accordingly.

Did Einstein not have a wife? (Two, actually). Greatness and domestic satisfaction don't have to be poles apart. Most great men of letters, science, etc. had wives and children. (It's only the rare woman who was allowed to be heroic who had to do without.)

First of all, I must disagree with some of Cary's advice. The Virginia Tech shootings weren't about "nothing". They stemmed directly from a society so disconnected from human emotion and personal identity that it has become deeply disaffected. People can live their whole lives on computers, rarely even seeing flesh-and-blood human beings. This passes for "human contact", and it is so ubiquitous that no one even questions it. We did not evolve to sit in front of cold screens, writing things that may not reflect anything about our true reality. We need real contact, which is the only way we can practice the intuition that tells us someone is seriously off base.

Secondly, saying the old "you have problems, I have problems" is quite insulting. It's like saying to a cancer patient, "You have cancer, I have eczema, it's all the same." This is deeply insulting to people who suffer from mental illness. Non-sufferers can't even imagine what they go through each day. They walk a swaying tightrope, whereas everyone else is on solid ground. If something knocks the balance-pole out of their hands and they fall, it's their own fault.

I am bipolar, and I will never forget the time I decided to try an experiment (against my doctor's advice) to go without my meds. This was met with nearly-universal congratulations from my friends, who said things like, "Thank God you're not taking that stuff any more," and "You can control this with diet and meditation". In a few months, I had the worst episode of my entire life and would have committed suicide, had I not been in the hospital for the first time in 15 years.

What is my point? The illness is so stigmatized that people encourage sufferers to throw away their pills and become "normal", as if the pills are at fault. Imagine if someone congratulated a diabetic for throwing away their insulin.

In fact, the stigma is embedded in the very name of the condition. "Mental" implies "not physical": i.e., something that you can control at will. If you don't, you are wilful and weak. We don't say "Parkinsonian illness" or "diabetic illness". How can you be "ill" and "well" at the same time? You can't, so you are damned to eternal sickness.

We need a new, more descriptive, morally neutral name. A friend of mine (a fellow sufferer)suggested "cognitive dissonance", and I came up with "disequilibrium". Not perfect, maybe, but far superior to the "you are ill, now and always" implications of "mental illness".

Sure, start a band. Keith Richards is, what, 75? His age didn't prevent him from falling on his head from a coconut tree, and snorting his father's ashes. This proves you can be shrivelled, stoned and stupid, and still be a star.

So I'm talking to my friend Kaylee, and she says to me, I'm like, crazy about my new jeans. And I'm like, Kaylee, you should, like, look in the mirror. And she's like, I did, stupid, and I'm like, you never looked in the back? And she's like, yeah I did, and I'm like, Like, you have major muffin top and butt crack, and she's like, shut up, you ho, just because I'm not a toothpick like you, I have a positive body image and don't need to diet all the time? And I'm like, fine, just get pants that fit, and she's like, Madison, you are such a bitch, and I'm like, Like, like them if you want to, but like them in your own bedroom. And she's like, Like, **** off?