is my worth my output?

the starving artist is alive and well, unfortunately.

Sometimes it’s exhausting, juicing your brain for ideas when all it wants to do is focus on keeping your body’s ecosystem running without further demands from you, desperate little creative.

I often think I am nothing if not my ideas. It’s all very self-indulgent and starving artist of me. I hate it, but also am resigned to the fact that it is undeniably true. I’ve done the corporate slog, the assimilation of a 4x4 upstanding citizen, the water cooler chat - brain melting, all of it. I even tried the creative-leaning-9-5s, and they somehow were almost worse.

Knowing I wanted to write, have my contribution to society be in the form of stories and essays and things that make people feel, and not being able to harness the capacity to create the ideas needed to sprout to begin crafting words for pleasure and not an Excel sheet that no-one would ever read, was painful. When I started my last job in advertising, I would tell anyone outside of the office that I was a freelance writer that also worked in Adland (a gross term that people in the industry actually use). When I got deeper into it, and the days in the office started turning into nights there too, I stopped having creative ideas. No matter how hard I begged my brain, read for inspiration, did mediation - like a record scratch, this ability stopped suddenly.

I no longer felt like I could say I was a creative if I couldn’t write an A4 page of ideas a day, no matter how silly or unusable. It was the act of making them, knowing that my creativity still worked, even if sometimes rusty and slow to start. But it weaned off until there was no give anymore. I didn’t pitch anymore or write one liners in my notes app. Maybe the fumes from the office killed off any creative determination in my brain, turning me into a mindless, routine-riddled robot that only knows how to use PowerPoint and do daily stand-ups. I would steal 10 minutes of those days, in a booth or break room to write something, but it was like putting my brain through a ricer, and then a Thermomix.

When I had enough of this, I quit and I celebrated like I’d just won the Lottery. Once the fog cleared, I had ideas again. For that book I’ve been talking about writing forever, for DUST BUNNY, for pitches, for my notes app. Turns out, I was in deathly need of a prescription in touching grass.

I used to care that my ideas had to be good enough to call myself a writer. That I had to attain a certain level of readership, or certain bylines, but none of that matters as much to me anymore (just a tiny bit remains as most creatives are fuelled at least a bit by ego). Now, my main concern is that I still have the capacity to think like me, question things I see, write if only for my journal because no one but you will care the way you do about the rest.