the quiet death of a creative person
on corporate life, creative exhaustion, and trying to find your way back to yourself.
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending your entire day being "useful" and coming home or logging off with no energy to do something that actually matters to you.
I don't think I realized how much corporate life could take from me until I started noticing what was disappearing. I can do my job and do it well. I have a paycheck that affords me a comfortable life.
But I've lost me.
I've lost the creative parts of me. The part that wants to write stories at 2 a.m. because an idea won't leave her alone. The part that can't wait to strum her guitar and sing a tune she wrote. The part that wants to make videos and take pictures and build tiny worlds on the internet. The part that wants to dance around her room by candlelight to a Stevie Nicks song. The part that sees the magic in everything around me.
Those parts of me are still there, and that's almost the worst part. I still have the ideas, I just don't have the energy. I spend most of my waking hours doing things that are necessary, practical, measurable, and completely disconnected from the things that make me feel alive. My life is nothing but a series of emails, meetings, deadlines, forced small talk, problems that need solving, other people's priorities and emergencies.
Then, after giving away most of myself for the day, I'm supposed to log off and somehow be creative with what little time I have left of my day. Of my freedom. Of my life.
Sometimes I sit down at my computer with every intention of continuing a story, and just stare at the screen. I know what to say, I have entire stories living in my head. I have blog posts half-written in my notes app. Video ideas. Characters. Scenes. Photographs I want to take and things I want to make. And yet, many times the most I can manage is scrolling mindlessly until it's time to go to bed. Then I feel guilty and ashamed and like I'm wasting my life. Because really, I am.
I wanted to create something. I'm supposed to be doing something I love.
Why can't I just do it?
I think that's the wrong question, though.
I think the real question is: what happens when you spend over forty hours a week in an environment that requires you to suppress so much of yourself, and then expect the tiny amount of energy you have left to somehow become art?
Creativity needs room. Creativity needs curiosity and boredom and wandering and daydreaming and room for mistakes. It needs time to follow an idea simply because you can.
Corporate life doesn't encourage those things. There's something especially painful about being a creative person in a job that doesn't care about your creativity. In a world that simply doesn't care.
Not because creativity makes you special, and not because everyone needs to quit their job and become an artist.
Perhaps because when you're only regarded for being productive, efficient and useful, it's very easy to start believing anything you do, simply because you love it, is a waste of time.
I've started to hate that. I've started to hate the idea that every little thing needs to be justified by what it produces, what it accomplishes, or how it benefits someone else.
I don't want every part of my life to have purpose. I don't want to monetize every hobby. I don't want to turn every creative impulse into a side hustle because I feel like I have to.
I just want to make things. I want to create things. I want to madly pursue something because I'm passionate about it. I want to be messy and chaotic. I want a life that isn't entirely about being useful.
Most importantly, I want to be free.
I've disappeared underneath the person I'm required to be at work, at this game called life, and that's what scares me the most. I can tolerate being tired, or having a bad week. I can tolerate being annoyed with my job or my coworkers.
What I can't ever see myself being okay with is the feeling I'm spending so much of my life doing something that leaves so little of me behind. I don't want to wake up one day and realize I spent most of my years answering emails and putting out fires. I don't want to become someone who stopped making things because she was always too tired.
Maybe that's why I'm writing this, because even if I don't know exactly how to change my life yet, I don't want to stop reminding myself that this person is still here. The creative, silly, weird me. The me who gets excited about fairytales and trinkets and coloring books and little details and impossible ideas.
She isn't gone completely, not yet.
She's just exhausted.
I don't think I've totally lost my creativity, but I am surviving on scraps. So for now, I'm working to try and get some of that back. To stoke the fire that fuels my creative self. Small things like a fantasy TikTok edit, a blog post, a few pages of my newest story written. Anything that reminds me that my life is supposed to belong to me.
[ PERSONAL REMINDER ]
I don't want a life that looks good on paper if I have to sacrifice the very parts of myself that make me who I am to make it work.
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