Creativity is awesome, stellar, tubular, rad (really dating myself with this list, huh?), magnificent, great, and wonderful. It’s also a huge pain in the ass.
Don’t get me wrong – sometimes I think about what life would be like if I didn’t have it sitting in my Mary Poppins bag of tricks (other items in that bag: chapstick) and it’s not a pretty thought. My life has stories to tell and they’d be infinitely more boring if I didn’t have it. I’d be that droning uncle at family reunions and none of us want that, really.
But right now, part of me really wants to strangle creativity’s neck. Not because it isn’t nice and pretty and helpful – nope, it’s all those things. But because it just won’t leave me alone! I’ve fallen into a creativity bubble – forgetting to eat dinner, only getting four hours of sleep, wanting to spend every moment reading and rereading and vacillating between “I just have” or “I have just.” Truthfully it isn’t such a bad place to be . . .
. . . except for the fact that I really have some other things I have to do. I have a job – getting four hours of sleep doesn’t really help me stay awake at it. I’m supposed to be researching and writing my thesis paper – sadly the romantic entanglements of fictional royalty does not have much bearing on my graduating. I have a house that’s still packed in boxes – being creative won’t help me find the missing Tupperware or my cheese graters.
But I’m also way too selfish to walk away from it now. I spent almost two years training myself to be creative when I sit in a restaurant with my notebook in hand – don’t I owe this to her, Lady Creativity, to let her come over when she wants to? When I stopped having time for restaurants she stopped coming round and that about broke my heart. Now she wants to catch up on lost time and what kind of friend would I be to say no? A rude one, that’s for sure – and who wants to be rude nowadays (politicians and political pundits are taking care of that for the rest of us)?
So I’m both happy and sad that creativity came a knockin’. I’m tired and cranky, rejuvenated and in need of buckets of caffeine, overwhelmed and startlingly at peace about it. Heck, but what else is new – I’m a writer.