Update #3

These days, the term “creator” goes hand in hand with social media. The population is divided into two categories, consumers and creators.

The problem I have with this association is that it implies the only way to be a creator is if you are actively sharing your art in a public space (and god forbid you only have a handful of followers). The truth is, you don’t have to share your art to be a creator. In fact, I would encourage you to create without publicly sharing it. A crucial phase of the artist’s journey is isolation, or the incubator phase. A phase that, in my perspective, doesn’t get nearly enough credit because it’s never broadcast, as is the nature of the incubator phase.

I think the term isolation gets a lot of negative connotation, but as an artist, one needs to learn to love it.

For me, the isolation phase looked a lot like sitting on my bedroom floor, writing songs no one would ever hear, and ripping pages filled with scribbled thoughts out of notebooks. It’s not glamorous and it’s not shareable, because it’s not meant to be. This is where you learn to hone your craft, listen to the universe, and absorb whatever ideas it’s trying to download into your brain. Sharing this part of the process shuts it down. You must go alone.

The past few years, it’s been harder and harder for me to access this incubator phase, and I’ve been on a search to figure out why that is. Sure, like gets busier. But there’s something more, a chemical change in my brain. For a while, I thought I’d just changed too much, and I’d lost the spark that made me an artist. Adulthood had done its damage and I was boring like everyone else now.

The idea that I’d never access that magic that is creative flow again sent me down a major depressive spiral. I became extremely anxious and dissatisfied with my work in general. I started to feel like life was just a waiting game until you die. I was so bored, and I dulled that boredom by consuming. Scrolling became habitual. After all, everyone else was doing it.

If I wasn’t scrolling, I was reading something that had the same effect on my brain. Consumption is a snake swallowing its own tail; it’s a never-ending cycle that ends up consuming you instead.

I don’t know exactly what shifted, but something did for me. Maybe it was survival. I didn’t want to continue living if this was all it would be. I started going on walks without my phone. I deleted social media, and I forced myself to only read books that would challenge me. Slowly, blood began to flow to those atrophied creative muscles again.

I was disconnected again, isolated, and suddenly, I found myself in that incubator period. Ideas flowed, and my motivation returned. The world still feels bleak, but at least while I’m writing, I’m in control of the narrative for a little while.