Rediscovering My Creativity

In the past few months, I’ve seen a lot of wonderful people openly sharing their thoughts about the world, about life, and about what moves them. In small statuses and larger posts, these people have slowly been making the internet, (which up until recently, I have mostly associated with negativity, hysteria, and fiction), a more honest and interesting place. A lot of these people have inspired me to make small changes in my life — changes that I was already looking to make but didn’t have the energy or motivation to tackle.

One of these things that I wanted to change was my lack of creative production. Recently I’ve been feeling stagnant and out of touch. With myself, and mostly with the happy person I used to be. I realized that this was in large part due to the fact that I had stopped creating.

I used to write every day.

I remember one of the first stories I wrote, when I was 7 or 8, was called the Eggs-asperated Easter Bunny (lmao). I think it was about the Easter Bunny being fed up with kids (which is honestly understandable) and eventually running out of eggs (or fucks) to give. It was illustrated by yours truly and if I ever find it, I promise to post it in its entirety. I have boxes and boxes of journals packed away in my closet, filled with stories of my first crushes, first heartbreaks, first tragedies and existential crises, and countless seconds, thirds, and so on. I used to write poems and stories too. Some were too emo for Tumblr, but some were actually pretty decent. I can’t remember a time I didn’t filter my emotions through a pen (or Word), until now.

I used to film, too.

When I was younger, my siblings and cousins and I used to put on performances for our family. We would script shows and sit everyone down as we forced them to listen to the creative musings of ten year olds. Sometimes we would put on dance shows. Or combination lip-sync/comedy shows. One Christmas, we acted out an entire Dr. Demento CD. Definitely not age appropriate, but definitely entertaining. Pretty sure we laughed so hard my cousin peed his pants like four times (he knows who he is). Eventually, I started filming our acts and shenanigans, which quickly evolved into documenting the life I saw around me, making movies for my family, my friends, and sometimes just for me.

I used to attempt to draw, paint, sing, act, whatever. I have always been creating, even if it was never good and even if I kept it to myself. And yet my journals have been blank, my iMovie hasn’t been opened in months, and my positive energy has been at an all time low.

I was on the phone with Kieran one night, crying about how unmotivated and uninterested I felt. He made me promise that I would try to write one sentence or film one second or take one photo every day. I’m not going to lie and say I’ve succeeded in this, but I have been making the effort to push myself. And with each page of rambling and each string of pointless clips I throw together, I’ve slowly felt my world getting a little brighter again.

So today I’m publishing the first post of (hopefully) many to share with the internet. Partly because, let’s be real, we all live for the likes. But mostly because I’ve recently seen a positive shift in my newsfeed, and if a page of my ramblings helps someone else shift towards positivity too, then that’s pretty rad.