I pulled out some of my old high school journals recently and skimmed through them, and although much of it is the same boring woe-is-me teenage crap that you'd find in anyone else's old notebooks, I am slightly impressed by how dramatic I was about shit. I mean, I may have been in the throes of adolescent misery, but some of the stuff I wrote was suuuuuuuper intense. For instance: "and now we are useless slugs incubating in this place, growing fatter and lazier with each passing day." Huh. I'd forgotten how much of a (kind of honest) downer I can be until I found this stuff. A bit much for a sixteen year old, no? But how funny that almost 15 years ago I was feeling very similarly to how I feel sometimes now, but was more capable of fluidly articulating it then. My brain is supposed to be getting sharper, wittier...isn't it?! (ETA: And I'm supposed to be getting LESS depressed, right?) So...why have my creative juices dried up, and how can I can them back? I desperately want to feel the urge to create like I used to, although those rare times that I do get the inspiration to create I can't seem to get anything OUT; it gets congested and stuck somewhere and dissolves as though it were never there. I need Mucinex for the soul, something to force all the icky dark stuff to ooze out onto a page/canvas/tissue/sleeve.
I need to cultivate my inspiration and my execution. I'll start small with a daily excersize like writing one page of something, ANYTHING, and then move on from there. I think some kind of class could really benefit me right now too; a photography class, for one, would really wake me the hell up right now (I think). I've always had what people have called "an eye", and there's something soothing about viewing the world through a lens (or in my case, digital screen) and seeing your vision transformed into permanent evidence of a Moment. I wish I had more talent for visual arts-- drawing, painting, sculpting, and whatnot-- but unfortunately it just isn't so. I've tried before (trust me, I'VE FUCKING TRIED!) but the results are crushingly pathetic, and similar to the style I imagine a vision-impaired preschooler would embody.
One time my daughter asked me to draw her a dragon and after I was done trying she narrowed her eyes at me and accused "That's NOT a dragon!" So there you have it.
(This is NOT the dragon that I drew. I stole this one from Google Images, and it's much more technically advanced than my dragon was.)
