Last night I had a bit of a personal revelation that I felt like sharing.
I know I don't have many followers that aren't bots, but if anyone has noticed, I have been rather quiet recently. To be transparent, I have been struggling through a fairly heavy depressive episode for a variety of reasons. I think, though, what's really weighed me down is the fact that I feel like I no longer love my craft the way I used to. Writing, to me, no longer excites me. It doesn't fill me with purpose and meaning like it once had. I'd struggled for a long time to find the reasoning behind this, and I think last night I was able to piece together the problem.
Unsurprisingly, with the current state of the world being what it is, and things in my own life pulling me down, I've fallen into a habit of closing off my thoughts and trying to drown myself in social media, gaming, and sticking to the grind of adulthood via looking for work or trying to set up the last part of my college career. I've just been living, but I haven't exactly been alive.
Last night, I remembered a thing that one professor emphasized in his class: the two most important words for a writer to remember are "Pay attention." I haven't been paying attention- not for a long time.
What I realized is that the girl I used to be, the one who saw everything as what it wasn't, had been quiet for a long time. The girl that looked at mundane objects and imagined them as something completely foreign, something entirely different in scale and purpose and aura, had gone quiet out of fear and exhaustion. My creative spark was gone because I had failed to nourish it. Life is what smothered it.
But last night, I started with those old habits again. I felt myself wake up and I began to look at everything in my room and saw a thousand things that each had their own stories, and a million more I could make up on the spot. I used to walk down hallways and imagine a cape flowing behind me, or look at the skyline and imagine a battle happening up there. I want that again.
I guess that's my advice if you feel you've lost your creative spark: Look at everything as what it isn't. Find the stories in things that aren't there. Pay attention to everything, lie about it, and excite yourself. In times like these, what we have is our art, and we should never let it die.
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