My creativity is in an odd place: I want to create, I want to write, and I feel inspired to write.
Yet, when I sit down to write, I find myself not writing. I get on social media. I read a Substack article. I check my email. I read a book. I reread portions of my book that I’ve reread multiple times and do nothing to revise or develop them.
When I do write, it doesn’t come out the way I imagined, and it feels stilted, stuck, flat.
I think back to when I used to write poems to perform at a weekly open mic, when I would sit down with a line in my head, or an image, and then the words just flowed forth and I read the poems in a hazy, dark room, buzzing on at least one F5 IPA.
The flow was so easy, then. I wrote two or three poems every week, and some of them were actually good. I wonder, often, if my creative flow was so easy because I was distracting myself from the work I was supposed to be doing: writing my dissertation.
There have been moments with my current project when the words flow, when I’ve felt inspired, when the words seemed to come from somewhere beyond my comprehension, but the ebbs are more common than the flows.
I think, at times like this, about the idea of inspiration and how often I use the reality that I feel uninspired to avoid writing altogether. I think about the ways I avoid writing – through reading, through focusing on interpersonal drama, through investing myself in other people’s creative projects, through filling up my time with social media or watching TV I don’t even enjoy, through taking on work I don’t have time for.
I learn, again and again, that sometimes the avoidance tactics will lead to inspired writing. A break from a project to do something else is actually a part of the writing process. Taking walks, meditating, spending time with friends, reading – all of this is important and can bring me back to the page, refreshed and ready to write.
That’s the trick, though: I have to actually get back to the page.
I have to write, at some point, and as Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones, writing consistently makes sure that we’re ready when the inspiration does strike.
Beyond feeling uninspired, I think I’m struggling to take myself seriously. I’m struggling to feel like my writing is something that is deserving of my dedicated and focused time. So many other things need my attention, and who am I to think that my book matters more than all those other things? Who am I to decide that writing time is just as important as spending time with friends, or getting the website updated at work, or going to events in my community? Who am I, and what is it I think is so important about my book that it deserves a place of priority?
There is so much that is deserving of time and energy – who am I to think my book is one of those things?
Just who do I think I am?
And so I have to answer that question: I’m a human who has a story inside me that wants to be told. I’m a human with a story about loss, grief, longing that may not be all that unique or special, but I’m the only one who can tell it, the way I’ll tell it.
I’m a human with something to write, and no one else can do that.
I’m a writer. And it’s time to take myself and my writing seriously.
Ink and Vein 