re: where did my creativity go?
This is a response1 to a post by Jerichards titled Where did my creativity go?
Their post resonated with me because it is something I ask myself often. Not just where did my creativity go, but what happened for it to go away?
Like Jerichards I do not believe that there is anyone to blame except ourselves in this matter, because it is true that life puts pressure on us to put things aside, but for us to push away something that is so fundamentally us, that cannot be anyones fault except ours.
Of course, it is always a much larger and complex issue, and they attribute their snuffing out of their creative spark to a fear of not being good at what they used to do daily. In my experience there is another layer: the feeling that I cannot be bothered with the creative act.
Sometimes I see the Ableton icon, still pinned onto my taskbar, and I get the instinctual urge to open it up and mess around in there. And as I proceed to drag the mouse onto it, and leave it there to hover, the bargaining has already started.
Eh, but it's going to take hours to do something good... What's the point? I've not done a track in years, why would I make one now? And who cares? You're not that guy anymore, and later we need to go do X and Y, and so on and so on. I can't be bothered.
Is there a fix to this? I honestly do not know.
In my obituary post, I rallied the imaginary masses to use our free time as an act of defiance. Go and nurture your remaining energies after days of battle into your hobbies, whatever they are, whatever form they take, because our freedom cannot be torn away from us by dragging us into the pit of scrolling. In there there must be a coinciding piece of the puzzle that must surely exist; awaiting to be found, extracted, and brought forward into the conscious realm of the mind.
The fundamental question here is: why can't I be bothered to express myself?
Recently it dawned on me that we are the most important being in the world, in the sense that, if you do not do anything for yourself, you are negating the only being that is experiencing life from life itself. If you do not exist, there is no world, there are no others. So it is the most illogical thing to not cater for the self before anything else, because how can one do good in the world (if one wishes to be altruistic, for example) if the self is utterly ignored and it's importance mishandled?
Like Jerichards, I too occasionally have a peek into my archive. I listen to old tracks and reminisce of those days. Live performances, illegal raves, sharing and talking about music production with other artists. Within me there were cosmologies which were begging to be drawn out (I am getting goosebumps just writing about it). Worlds which wanted manifesting. I craved to extract them and codify them into musical form...
...and well that's it, I sit there nostalgic, bathing in the bittersweetness of a youth well spent.
Often I ask myself if it's simply the case that I am not that person anymore. But then why persist with this somber mood? I don't know. Maybe it'll come back to me, maybe I'll give it up. Whatever the outcome, right now I feel as if something is missing inside of me.
Never done one of these so forgive the formalities, I don't know what I'm doing.↩