I studied physics and astronomy at CalTech and UC Santa Cruz, and have co-authored a few scientific papers. While I can look back at my drawing books and the bookshelves full of software that I have written, my own experience of my life is that it usually going at an interminable crawl. When I get depressed, I get bored. Nothing is fun. I would enjoy doing.
Nothing ever seems to be happening.
I struggle to keep myself occupied. Then from time to time I look back and see all the things I have done and am quite surprised. There is a difference, though, between feeling creative and actually being creative. When I am mildly manic, I get very inventive. During one mildly manic period I invented a new method of compressing computer graphic images, and lay awake nights scheming of ways to get the compressed files ever smaller, only to get up and stay up all night long writing insanely clever code.