My Creative Slowdown

Awake

Next to the fogged-up windows inside my head, lies a little wooden chest. It’s filled up to the brim with what one would regard as creative concepts, and, more often than not, it instructs me to make use of one. But what it does not realize is that the themes and ideas aren’t awake, they remain covered under heavy quilts of doubts and reservations, so, they hide in the warmth of their beds. Perhaps it’s time to awake them, or else they will be forgotten forever.

Hi, I’m an undergrad and I miss the feeling of being thirteen and frantically finishing a book in less than a day. I miss how I’d be so engrossed in reading, that hair falling on the pages of my book would remain unnoticed. I miss how the cup of tea, on the table, would once again go cold as I’d turn page after page. I miss how my eyes would close softly as I’d stay late and then finally feeling a smile on my face when I’d go to sleep, waiting for dark, soft dreams to reach my mind. I think about it a lot these days, while finding it hard to finish reading even a small passage without getting distracted or feeling fazed.

It’s okay though. It’s okay to lose the motivation to obsessively read and write. It’s okay to think that you have run out of creativity. It’s okay to hate your work, then get really good and then start all over again. But it’s not okay to think that you’d be an overnight success. It’s not okay to think that each piece you write will be laden with flawlessness for there’s not a way where one can never be held in judgment by other people, where one can totally escape criticism. What’s necessary to realize is that- the idea of growth and learning with each mistake, and finding the hope to try over and over and over again after each failure. 

But even with hope and faith, it soon becomes challenging to come up with newer ideas. I tried thinking of novel perceptions and laid in the forest of my mind, while convincing myself that it would be “just for five minutes”. I closed those eyes but when I opened them- the tiny saplings around me had grown massive and the ponds had dried up, I heard the trees whisper that I had been gone for too long. And that’s when I believed, for a long time, that all the best ideas had already been thought of and been worked upon and maybe there isn’t anything new, I can come up with.

That’s where I was wrong. It’s important to recognize that the world is big enough, it’s big enough for everyone’s metaphors- yours and mine, it’s big enough for the heavy rain which kisses entire villages, it’s big enough for the light that falls on so many of our bedroom walls, because you might just call it the glow of the moon while for me it remains soft and golden like sunlit honey.

So, cherish your metaphors and treasure them as they’re yours and always will be. And do not worry about finding your magnum opus for there’s a reward after finishing every piece, the enormous prize here is that you have created something and that I think is as good as it gets.