Lulled

Archived from May 19, 2024:

The ebb and flow of my energy has been unpredictable lately. I frequently find myself in bed, on the floor, on the couch with no desire to rise and put my life together, let alone make something. I had hoped that the spring would bring energy, and while it brought some, the stability I was looking forward to has yet to show itself. While the inconsistency in my energy is true, the fact that I don’t make things is a story I tell myself. It is easy to hold others and their efforts in high regard and myself in deep contempt for thinking my creations have any merit or worth. I am working on taking the things I make more seriously. I am working on reminding myself that I do, indeed, make things. It’s easy to discard the things I make, particularly because it is me, making them largely for myself. A poor excuse of an artist with a negligible audience of one.

I don’t want to insinuate that creativity is easy, or doesn’t take energy, rather that I have certainly been making it harder on myself by carrying this disdain for my own time spent. I try to rest and feel immense guilt. I think of laundry, vacuuming, groceries; I think of how if I were a better and more interesting person I would have a life worth making art about in the first place. I sleep, I take supplements, I work out in a desperate clamour to find some consistent energy and when I do find and spend the energy, no activity feels like the correct choice. When nothing feels like the right choice, how do you even begin to know what you want?

I have been spending a lot of time writing lately; I’m in a personal writing sprint with the London Writer’s Salon, actively running a home brew Dungeons & Dragons campaign and working on a separate horror campaign with custom weapon mechanics. I have been chipping away at the kitchen mural and producing dozens and dozens of videos at work. I sit here on my couch, being poked and prodded by Kafka, writing this. I don’t know why this all totals to nothing to me; I don’t know how to assign value to the things that feel innocuous and obvious. I am trying to be kinder to myself, to let myself rest in a way that isn’t just for maintenance, to find the drive to do the things I love, or used to. It is slow, devastatingly so, but I am working on it.

Thank you, as ever, for being here friends and thank you for joining me for this interlude. I’ve been working on several other pieces, slowly but surely and with the guidance and support of a writing sprint community. I look forward to sharing some of these works here, but I’m trying to remind myself that while deadlines can be useful, pressuring myself through the creative process isn’t always going to be the best course of action. Before you go, a small request:

One of the writing exercises I’ve been enjoying is something called a hermit crab essay, where an essay is fit into a non-literary form. For example, a classified ad or a manual. If you have any suggestions for form, please feel free to share! Maybe it will even make it into this theoretically weekly work in progress.