The Return

Whoa! Creativity!

 For four months, from November to March, I woke up every morning and wrote a story. Most of those stories, at least the decent ones, made it onto my blog. I feel silly talking about my blog. Blogging was all the rage a decade ago, in an earlier version of the internet before reels and Tiktoks and Covid and whatnot. Everyone had a blog or a tumblr to share their knowledge and stories. Then social media came along and stole the thunder and the publicity. I am not knocking blogging; they are great ways to share stories or learn information. But they have been replaced in the pop culture sphere and aren’t quite old enough to be classic; kind of like CD’s. Everyone is digging vinyl again, and streaming is the hot new thing, but CD’s are just kicking around in the console of your truck, waiting to be valuable again. 

Blogging, at least in my social spheres, went out of style when Instagram and Reddit came into style. So obviously, like the social buttercup I am, I jumped right on the Blog Train and started firing off stories like it was 2004 all over again. For a while I felt like I had more to say than my weak typing hands could handle. And then, suddenly, the ideas dried up. It’s not that I ran out of stories, I just ran out of things to say. 

In the past, I would panic when I came to a natural downturn in creative motion. I hate stagnation. I am flummoxed how my brain can work like a fire hose one day and a desert the next. But I have experienced droughts before. 

January 2015 was a notable drought for me. As was May 2016 and November 2019. There have been others scattered throughout my adult life, little black holes in between creative onslaughts. Sometimes they are frustrating, other times they are just sad. Sometimes there comes a stretch of bad weather where all I want to do is sleep and watch mediocre movies on TV. Often I would eat a lot of garbage food and stay up late, wasting hours and days doing nothing useful. I am not proud of those times. Productivity is a core tenet in my self-worth. When I am not making anything, I feel useless, wasteful, worthless; even if I rationally know that I am not. The bad diet and sleep patterns only exacerbate the problem. 

Morning is when I am most creative. Looking back at my journals, notebooks and blog posts, I have discovered that all my best ideas arrive between the hours of 6 am and noon. When I stay up late watching TV, I very rarely wake up before 7 and even more rarely do I feel any compunction to write or compose. 

But thankfully, inevitably, that day comes along where I accidentally go to bed by 8pm and sleep fitfully. I wake up at 5am absolutely buzzing with ideas. I often skip breakfast, satiated completely by the pummelling of ideas into my computer keyboard or guitar fretboard. Hours fly by in a whirlwind as I press record over and over. Documents clutter my computer screen as I simultaneously work on two or three projects at once. I am frenzied in my delight. 

That was how I woke up this morning after taking three weeks off from my blog. I am back, baby! Lets make some stuff! Onward to the future!