This June, all my drive to be creative vanished.
Up until that point, I’d been creating; prolifically, some might say. My time was spent filming and editing youtube videos, as well as writing substack newsletters, poetry books, news articles, and blog posts. The last few years of my life had almost solely been focused on these pursuits.
And while I’d enjoyed it for some time, I hadn’t realized how much it had drained me.
Sure, I enjoyed all of it while I was doing it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t making me bone tired. I longed for Friday evening when I could close my laptop and unplug for the next two days, to not think about angles or essay topics or my thoughts on the book I just read. By Sunday afternoon, I was dreading the next day.
The turning point was when we went away on a cruise at the end of May. With no internet access on the ship, I scheduled all my posts in advance, looking forward to a week without my phone—I couldn’t even check my email. It wasn’t until we arrived home and my mind began turning that I realized I couldn’t do it all anymore.
Don’t get me wrong; I tried! But June was a challenge to get through. I loathed having to pull my camera out of the closet; I felt indifferent to my newsletter; I even deleted Instagram off my phone in hopes of minimizing the amount of time spent on my phone.
One strange thing about me is that I generally don’t know what’s bothering me until I remove that thing from my life through a method of trial and error. This is likely due to some new diagnoses I’ve received recently; more on that in the future.
And through June, what I realized was that Youtube needed to go. The hours of filming and editing were getting to me, and even when I wasn’t doing those things, my mind was constantly combing through ideas and angles and titles—it was exhausting. Hilariously, my last video has “a note on almost quitting youtube” in the title and I think that’s objectively funnier than editing the video I filmed before making the decision to quit.
The thing is, I keep straying from what I actually love: writing. For some reason, I keep picking up new things, thinking it’ll do something, though I still haven’t figured out what that is. But really, all I’m doing is detracting from time I would rather spend working on a newsletter, or a blog post, or my next novel.
Something I’ve learned about myself over the past couple of years, though, is that unless I’m being creative in a way I want to be creative, I’m not going to do it. And, if at any point it starts to feel too restrictive—say, having to post at the same time every week for the invisible algorithm, or an SEO machine telling me I need to use a keyword—I’m not going to keep doing it.
What I realized through all this is that, in order to create, it has to be for me. And so, that’s why I’m moving forward in a way that ensures what I create is, first and foremost, just that: a creative output. I’m going to write what I want to write; I’m going to post when I want to post; I’m not going to stick to a formula in hopes that what I share gets picked up and carried off with the current.
Because at the heart of it, our creativity is for us. And while humans have always shared in their creative pursuits, the internet—and sharing much of our lives on it—is a relatively new experience. As a side note, I remember when the internet was a raw, unfiltered place, where you could find personal blog posts with weird fonts coded in. Nothing was made to look perfectly posed or styled; it was all real and personal.
What I’m going to try to capture going forward is the essence of how creativity used to be. Yes, I’ll be sharing on the internet, but I’m hoping it will feel more like a conversation with a friend over coffee, or a play seen at a local theatre, or a tiny poetry reading in some back alley bar. I don’t want polished and shining and structured; I want honest and human and maybe a bit lopsided. I hope you do too.
Talk to you soon,
Catherine
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, you may also like my substack newsletter, where I write about life, art, culture, gardening, and all things whimsical and weird. I also offer paid tiers, where readers gain access to an extra newsletter, mini book reviews, and digital copies of my books, among other things. Finally, you can find me on Youtube, where I share daily life, gardening, baking, writing, and general lifestyle videos. Hope to see you there!
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