I want to write, but I can’t.

It seems never-ending. The cycle continues, over and over again. I am lost without my art. A creative person is always creative, but without a connection to his or her art, one will become slowly unhinged, and so I have.  I keep finding myself trapped in the same loop, like a record skipping. Caught in between desires and shameful lack of motivation, I find myself here, at my keyboard, berating myself again for not doing what my teachers always told me to do. Write, write, write. Nurture your passion, nurture your love, the thing you are good at, the one damn thing that everyone told you that you were the best at your entire life. What have I traded it for? A decent job that I don’t hate and a half-inflated social life consisting of shallow first dates and beers out with friends once, maybe twice a week. Why is it so impossible for me to do what I’m the most passionate about? What’s stopping me from bridging the gap between a wannabe writer and a legitimate one?

An empty document and blinking cursor are insurmountably daunting, as any writer can attest. During the day when I can’t channel them, my thoughts are at their most potent, and creative. They are fireflies on a hot June night. Later, I’m the eager child, struck by their elusive beauty, running clumsy and barefoot on the dewy grass, mason jar in hand – trying in vain to capture them, to make them last, to preserve the spontaneous magic of a brilliant thought. Only when they are finally in my jar, captured, they somehow don’t shine as brightly. They are only simple creatures, not magic at all.

There are a thousand things that move me. Yesterday on the way to my hike I thought of them all. What inspires me? Endless blue skies, polaroids, heart shaped lenses, the impossible white of my cat’s paws, to name a few. What infuriates me? Deception, when someone belittles me, hold queues, traffic, bad hair days. Inspiration is so fleeting though, and it’s so easy to get caught up in the trappings of ordinary life. An unpaid bill, a broken heart, the fact that it’s simply easier not to.

I miss the quiet of my life before the internet, before life sprang boldly through the ether, before the images of socialites and global tragedies struck the screen. I want the blank document back, the distraction-free zone sitting on the ergonomic chair, tapping gloriously away at a story of my own making. It didn’t matter if it was juvenile and it didn’t have to change the world. All that mattered was that it was my own story, a bud that I had allowed to blossom on its own. I miss it miss it miss it. Give me back my late night keyboard taps. Give me back my inspiration. I’m calling on you now, writer-soul. I want you to make a comeback as a grown up. You’ve learned twenty five years of life lessons. You’ve steeped in the chaos and heartache of existence for long enough. It’s time to catch some fireflies – and watch them actually glow.