It has been such a weird week. I spent 2 days crying about a creative slump and then over losing a bunch of important files, and then started 3 new artworks, completed one of them, finished the second one half-way through, didn’t bother with the third, and now I have an idea sketched out for the fourth.
It’s so weird how creative highs and lows work. Highs and lows, in general, actually.
One moment has you feeling as though you have no good ideas left in your head anymore, and then the next thing you know, you’re just filled with too many good ideas to even know where to begin. And the more you actually think about it, the more you realize that this is probably true for most things we go through.
I wish I knew how it worked, but I am just as baffled as anybody else at the moment. Maybe it was because I decided to not let my failures keep holding me back anymore, maybe it’s because I channeled my disappointment into something that could make me feel better about my own abilities. Maybe it’s because I had a solid support system to lean on when I was down and crying about how unfair everything was. Or maybe it’s just that things take time to happen on their own and forcing them to happen when I was clearly not in the right headspace to make it happen.
If anyone were to ask me how I tackle with these things, I don’t.
I am an actual cranky, crying mess when I am unable to get my ideas on paper… well, somewhere I can allow them to take shape, which is currently my laptop and a bunch of canvases in various stages of completion. But I think it is very important to acknowledge that you’re not going anywhere with your idea if it keeps failing again and again when you’re making no effort to do things differently.
Try changing a variable or two, or something, I don’t know. We’re clearly going to get nowhere if we keep taking the same route knowing fully well that it isn’t working for us. All I know is that you need to allow yourself to feel sad about things you’re going nowhere with, because living in denial never really worked for anybody. I’ve learnt that the hard way. You know how you fall down and hurt yourself a couple of times, you eventually know how to protect yourself, or maybe just reduce the damage, after a while? That’s sort of how this works.
It’s kind of like surfing? I don’t know, I’ve never really been, but from what I do know of it, I can tell you that you’re not going to be surfing that wave forever. You know that even the tallest waves eventually die down, but that’s just more motivation for people to swim back in deeper and find another wave to surf. Of course it can be discouraging. But we could either let things discourage and cripple us into never being able to do what we love anymore, or we could just let ourselves be sad for a while and then pick ourselves right back up.
That choice always remains with us.
Cheerio! Xx
Featured Image by Tim Marshall on Unsplash
The Shubhster Diaries 
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