This year, I told myself I was going to dive back into writing. It had been gnawing at me, various ideas percolating, bubbling, screaming to be let out of my head and onto the page.
So of course, as I decide I'm going to write, all words leave my brain. I've felt foggy, sticky in the mind. It's even been hard to simply sit down with a book and make it past the same page my bookmark has been on for more than a month. Several different varieties of chaos may be to blame. Or maybe not.
My mind hasn't been in a words-kind-of mode right now. It's an unnatural state for me. Even when I wasn't writing productively in recent years, I'd post several hundred word rants about anything and everything on social media. Words are one of my most natural states of expression.
It's uncomfortable that I am not even a little motivated to write right now. Even this little snippet here feels taxing and clunky.
And yet, I want to make stuff, work on design, getting ideas for patterns, videos, how to implement different ideas. Colors and fibers I want to use. I'm even thinking about ideas to modify and customize my shoes. I'm on my phone researching how to stitch things onto shoes. The words aren't there, but the "make stuff" side of my brain is in overdrive.
I heard once that the healthiest artists were always sculptors. I don't know the truth of that or if there's data to back it up. But I bet I could name at least a dozen writers who suffered from addiction, depression, and other mental illness in less than a minute. Plenty of painters suffered similarly. So maybe there is something to working with your hands, making things, physical objects rather than transitory words or two-dimensional images, that keeps a mind healthy. Maybe not.
Maybe my brain pushing me into the physical end of creativity is the same way that my body craves a diet of fresh greens after a holiday sugar binge--inherently, my body knows that I need a specific kind of nourishment and tells me to seek it out to balance some of the more unhealthy choices or circumstances of late. Rather than fight it and try to do something I'm not in a frame of mind to attack at this moment, maybe the best course of action is to dig in where it feels healthiest at the moment. Set the story and poem ideas aside for a bit--not forgotten or thrown out, just saved and stored for a more opportune moment. And trust that everything will come around again when I'm in a better place to receive the inspiration for it.
