Please feel free to answer these questions on your blog or in the responses. If you leave me a link to your post, I will re-post it on my blog. You can also feel free to forward these questions to anybody who might be interested. Thank you to those who have already shared their thoughts.
What are your thoughts on creativity?
My thoughts are I don’t feel like I harbor a drop of creativity any more. I have always known life would be hard, that I had a lot to learn this time around, but I never realized how the challenges would keep growing harder and harder.
What happened to life getting easier as you go along? Shouldn’t writing get easier? Love?
Maybe my life of increasing difficult challenges has made me too cynical to see the reality anymore. The reality, you know, is that life is what you make it. Creativity is what you make it. Challenges are either problems or solutions.
I’ve started to simplify again. I started a bullet journal, but it quickly ballooned up to include so much that I was overwhelmed. If I had the choice, I would keep track of everything in my life. You might say I have control issues.
And, frankly, you would be right. I felt so out of control and unable to act for so many years, I refuse to bend anymore. Yes, I know this will break me. Yes, I know give and take, bending in the wind of adversity, is the way to survive, but it’s not for me right now. I need firm roots to bend and, right now, my roots are feeling pretty shallow and weak.
So, back to creativity. What happened?
When I was in college, I completed an 800 page manuscript, revise and retyped it 8 times. This was before computers and word processors (yes, the dinosaur days) so when I say re-typed, I mean it. That fire got lost in life, burned out maybe by the endlessness and the pain of hiding from the world.
What would have happened if I had met and married someone who respected me and loved me for who I was.
All those wasted years.
But isn’t that the way creativity is destroyed? Looking backwards instead of forwards. Regretting instead of picking ones self up and carrying on?
I don’t always get the memos on time and, this one, I may have missed altogether. The Muses or God or one of my characters reached out and tapped me on the shoulder, but I was too busy looking back to feel the touch.
How depressing. I have been struggling with my Bi-Polar these past few years more than any time since I started on medication. The depression started at the end of 2016 and hasn’t let go yet.
So what do I do? Creativity is ingrained in each and every one of us, but how easy it is to lose touch with ourselves? Unfortunately, very.
Unfortunately, I have, or I feel I have.
Tomorrow, I finalize my bankruptcy. On the 28th, I go in for surgery. If I get through these, I will be good.
That isn’t the way it works either. It’s not tomorrow or when I get a bigger house or a better job or even have surgery. It’s now. In this moment and then the next and the next. These are the times when we are whole, when creativity fills us, when we realize how glorious, strong and creative, we really are.
Let the good times roll!
