It is incredibly frustrating to find myself here: struggling to force myself to do what I once did because I could not NOT do it. Create. Even this blog is a struggle. I am consumed with organizing and compartmentalizing thoughts, techniques, ideas, facets of my life. I spend most of my idle waking moments in an endless state of gathering… while edging no closer to the starting line. (If I could only pare down my rss subscriptions or find the right tool to export my blog posts to twitter, then I could finally focus on writing or photo-editing… oh, and after I find some new lightroom presets and textures and read a couple of photoshop tutorials and find some interesting books or magazines to read, then… oh, and…) Instead of feeling inspired, I feel increasingly oppressed by my own immobility. I even try to come up with, in the absence of being compelled to capture and sketch life in words or pictures, a creativity-themed topic for this website. And I keep returning to the subject of creative block. What are the obstacles? Identify. List. Name. What I really need is to have a writing space. How to write in the midst of external stress. How to find the extraordinary in a mundane, day-to-day existence. It is a circular path. I have stood in this place before. Standing for years.
In the cabinets under the bookshelves among the untrashable clutter of the home office, my stacks of black notebooks silently age – curling and yellowing their pages imperceptibly but as surely as time clicks on and on, all the while growing no taller. Stunted. It is not for lack of time. Even now, during my busiest quarter, there are plenty of hours in the day. That is no excuse. And I know I could, if I wanted to, blame it on a profession where creativity has no value. But that is unfair and untrue. My career allows me to keep my personal expressive endeavors entirely separate from my livelihood. My burnout has no effect on my earnings or my job performance. See: compartmentalizing even now. How many posts have I devoted to categorizing my life? Even if there is truth to it, or even if there is some merit in examining one’s existence and ensuring order and meaning in its routines and processes, you still must at some time reach the point of diminishing returns. I am stuck in a muddy pit and, instead of grabbing a rope, have been content to sit and describe the mud. While I starve, the rope dangles right there above my head, well within reach.
There must be a way to jumpstart the growth again. And I am fairly certain the answer is something along the lines of giving up trying to find the right tools, the right mindset or the right voice. Giving up and just jumping in and doing what you have always done… what you used to do without hesitation and without restraint. Giving up and giving in and allowing yourself to be reckless and raw and unedited and piss-poor. Starting. Starting now. Begin.
Amen.