Creativity Might Be Dead...mine at least

Pandemics suck the life out of you. Literally and figuratively. RIP to those who died, but man oh man has this made ghosts out of creatives.

I've always been lucky enough to use both sides of my brain, so I'm not totally gone, but there's a piece of me that is painfully aware of how much I miss an outside that I normally took for granted.

I can blame academia, maybe even my new job spec, but if I'm honest, I'm not as exposed to the things that inspired me.

Faces that so clearly enjoyed and relished in their own existences, they had nothing to do with me, but they inspired me.

If we're fair, we have to play chicken-or-egg with creativity because creatives inspire each other. But, in an unprecedented time, where we're all taken away from inspiration, we're starved, I'm starved.

I have become as clinical and cold as the hallways of a COVID hospital. I am as dry and forlorn as the patient's cough. 

I used to see colours and ideas, they lived in me and multiplied till I couldn't sleep. Nowadays, what keeps me awake is the anxiety that grips me on Sunday nights.

Every workweek is a new exercise in fighting information overload, burnout even. I love my job, but what it requires of us in this incarnation of the world isn't a thing of humans. You feel guilty for being sick or taking time off, but you have to. 

The pandemic doesn't make you sick in direct ways alone, I'm suffering, we all are.

Pray for your creative friends.