Creativity and Agitation

Yesterday on Bluesky, one of my mutuals wrote that it wasn't until the term was over and they had a bit of uninterrupted time to themselves that they found they wanted to write again. The stress of everything else going on around them kept them from wanting to write, they said, and they needed both the time and space to start to find themselves again.

Four months into 2025 and I'm finding I work something like the opposite. I've always written in snatches - a phrase or a line will come to me, I'll jot it down on my phone, and try to write something more with it later. But I'm also finding that every other part of what I do creatively has gone into overdrive this year. I organize my poems in my git repo by year, and find that for an average year, I wrote 40-50. I'm already at 28, and I feel like there's a quality there that's been lacking the last couple years. The sort of thing that separates "complete, but meh" from "complete, and something". Not that I have any expectation of them really turning into something - I've been circulating a manuscript for years, and sometimes it gets "this is close, keep sending it elsewhere", sometimes it gets a bloodless form rejection. I tinker with it. I feel like it's strong. It picks up another rejection.

I've published lots of poems, but don't have a collection to show for it. Despite everything I've published, I've got probably a couple hundred other poems that are good, and complete, and going nowhere. Oh well, hey? So I keep adding to these. At this point, there's easily a second manuscript somewhere in there. And in the meantime, the months go on. I've got some readings coming up, both as audience and performer. One thing I miss is how, during the pandemic, even towards the end, when things were beginning to open up, events were virtual. That's slowly vanished. People have stopped trying. I get that there are additional costs involved, additional efforts. But it's sad.

And beyond writing, there's my music. My practice has been really scattershot, and spread across a bunch of instruments, tracking my lifelong inability to stick to just one thing. This year I've bought more rosin, more valve oil, slide grease, new guitar strings. I'm getting my chops back on some instruments. Doing composition on others. Feeling very much like my life is, statistically, half over, and that if I don't start certain things, they just won't get done. That's the attitude that got me into a lot of stuff in my 20s and 30s, anyway ("if not now, when?"), but I think I lost it for a bit, when I was struggling during the pandemic, and just trying to get back, to see each day as something new rather than the repetition of something that came before.

(And maybe wishing more people would think that way, though that's neither here nor there.)

So the stress is still there. I feel it. But I'm trying to channel it into various things. Hoping what I make might find its audience, and trying to fumble towards some sort of better version of myself.