The Feeling of Not Being Able To Create

I am a creator and a designer. I have always been intrigued by good design and meaningful creation. Both are important to me and I always want to be designing and creating. Moving to recent events, I had given in my laptop, the Dell XPS 15, in for repair due to a problem with its headphone jack. Despite being a minor issue, it was four weeks before I would see my laptop. It took two weeks to get a transfer order and the other two weeks to get it fixed.

I honestly do not know how I did it; without my laptop, I felt incomplete.

A lot of my work and free time is spent on my laptop. Free time was not the thing I was concerned about but rather, it was the work I wanted to accomplish this summer. All the plans I had made and more had been put on a halt. Examples of things that I could have been doing if I had my laptop included writing Medium posts, learning design, and making videos. I could not really do any of these things to the best of my ability without mylaptop.

My family is filled with people that love to work. I am no exception. I cannot spend my time doing unproductive thing. My ambition drives me to want to do more. I cannot just sit down and relax; no doubt that is great but there is a limit.

I love creation and design specifically. To get better at both these thing you simply continue doing them and I was getting out of practice without doing so. The level of productivity dropped daily like the reverse of the snowball effect.

Those days without my laptop sucked energy out of me at a rate undeniably annoying. I was becoming lazier.

A lot of people would say that I should not use my laptop as an excuse to avoid work but when my work is centric around my laptop, it becomes hard. To a limit, I did not let that become an excuse. That is why I tried doing things that could keep me in the design and creation mindset. I began learning hand lettering and I’ve for sure seen some improvement for one whose handwriting is terrible. I created scripts for videos on paper instead of on Word or Typora including the script for this article’s YouTube equivalent (and yes, paper still exists). I wireframed my portfolio website on paper.

All these productive things made me feel good but I was still terribly unbalanced. I spent alarge amount of my time watching movies and I’ve genuinely watched too many in this 4 week time period. (On a side note, the DC Animated Universe is amazing for any one wondering what I watched mainly.) My use of social media had drastically risen for the better and the worse. For the better because I felt I was more aware of cool things going on in the world especially due to my use of Twitter (my favourite social media; follow me @TheVarunKhatri). And for the worse, because I was sometimes just doing it to avoid thinking about how terrible my summer was going so far.

All of this was hitting me terribly hard in the face with a punch. My summer had become pointless. My efforts had become pointless. I felt like I had become pointless and I would not be able to create again.

That feeling of not being able to create is a feeling I do not want.

In the end, I have my laptop back now and that is the reason why you are able to read this. Be excited for the future as I continue to create here, on YouTube, and on the web in general.