I’m trying to write again. It’s so hard, it’s like a bird trying to take flight after lounging in its nest too long, slightly puffy from overeating. Writing after a long hiatus is weird and uncomfortable. It isn’t coming naturally like it used to. I’m accustomed to banging out the usual five paragraphs in a matter of minutes, and then spending the day editing them. Now it feels like an unwieldy act of creation, something that seems to serve no other purpose than to embarrass me.
It’s fine, I remember hitting this hurdle a few years back. I would write and hate everything I wrote. I hated the way my voice sounded when it hit the page, I hated everything I produced. Even right now it feels clunky, and that’s annoying to deal with. But in some ways it also feels like you’re coming home, like those old pains that come with creation still have their edges. I’m running my fingers along something more familiar than forgotten.
It will come with time, right? Creativity, even creative visions and creative goals, tend to be fluid and unmanageable. Most good ideas eventually become memories. Ones you keep revisiting until you are able to turn them into the reality they were meant to be. I remember sitting on a boat last year, depressed out of my mind, coming up with creative projects. It was nice to envision putting something together, but the logistics of actually assembling a project, is an entirely different reality.
When I got back from Guatemala last year I was so depressed. I wanted to burn down my entire life in New York and move to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Sri Lanka. I wanted to learn a different language, start a coffee company, buy property in Brooklyn. I wanted to do everything. I met with a tarot reader before I left and he said that I couldn’t do everything that popped into my head. He looked at the cards “let it flow, you are too strong in the mind.”
He was right. I had plans and God laughed. Reality was its own beast and life didn’t unravel the way that I wanted it to. So much of being alive is learning to accept the shape of things, to flow with the current instead of against it. On a particularly balmy Saturday in a park with Todd, I was lamenting to him while high on psychedelics and munching on watermelon. “I feel like it’s breaking me” I whined. “You’re resisting it too much” he said, “let it break you.”
a soft death 