I disappeared for a while. Here’s why.
[TL;DR I found genuine happiness and suddenly nothing else mattered. Then I finally discovered that that wasn’t enough so here I am again. I’ll be posting here regularly again but not as frequently as I have up until now.]
So I realized something the other day. This is the happiest I’ve ever been. And I’m genuinely happy. Even though I’m very aware of some big things in my life that make me sad to think about, they don’t really tarnish the big picture anymore. I’m so happy that I stopped writing. Not because I don’t like it, but because I was just so caught up being happy that I forgot how, if that makes sense. I guess a better way of putting it is that I lost confidence in my creativity, and I was okay with that for some reason.
As some of my more frequent readers may have guessed, most of my inspiration comes from my dreams. Several months ago, I stopped having vivid dreams altogether, which slowly started me down this path of cobbling together poems and flash fiction that I wasn’t particularly passionate about. But the other night I finally had a dream. I dreamt of just simply lying there, asleep. And it scared me when I woke up. I don’t typically have simple dreams like that. I mean, sometimes, sure. But for this to be the only dream I remembered having in such a long time, it really bothered me and it really just resonated with my inactivity here.
And so I pushed myself and finally wrote my first poem in about a month about that epiphany. I feel like a weight has just been lifted off my shoulders. I’m finally coming down from the high of being happy. And I’m still happy, but now I can access that happiness while also connecting with my hobby and imagination. I’m also making some progress on my next project again and I’ll hopefully start working on that in earnest fairly soon. This new state of mind is great, don’t get me wrong, but I need more out of life. I want to leave something worthwhile behind after I’m gone and I can’t do that just sitting around smiling my ass off all the time. So it’s time to get back to work.
But in hindsight, I think the schedule I set for myself here is partially to blame. It’s not even that I don’t want to keep writing poetry and flash fiction for this blog (because I most certainly do), it’s more that I don’t the time or energy to commit to it like I used to. This was starting to feel like a chore, not at all what I originally intended. Three times a week was very doable, but I have a lot more on my plate now. So I definitely think I need to cut back to a more realistic schedule. Once a week seems doable, but there’s a fair chance that some weeks would end up with something more like this post. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world I suppose. No matter what happens, having this outlet to just lay everything out for myself has been really therapeutic and I don’t want it to stop any time soon.
mack rogers writes 