I’d be curious to know if other creatives find that they become more unhinged when not actively creating something. I frequently joke that as a writer, I am a “worse person” when I don’t have some kind of project that I’m working on—but none of my friends really create the way that I do, so they don’t “get it.” Maybe this is exclusive to creatives who are also mentally ill, lmao. But increasingly, I feel like if I don’t have something that I’m writing, or thinking about writing, I wind up overthinking literally anything and everything else in my life, spiraling, or I’m just kind of generally depressed/in a bad mood until I have something else to latch myself onto again. Which, as you can imagine, gets wildly complicated by the fact that I am a perfectionist to a detrimental degree (part of why I started this blog, to have a sort of nowhere space to just dump things without worrying if they are “good”)—if I don’t think what I’m writing is good enough, or if I have an idea but I’m not confident I can execute it perfectly, I stop, I do endless edits and rewrites (and wind up getting super frustrated with myself) or I simply don’t start at all.
The last fic that I wrote, I kind of entered a wild, obsessive state with it and ended up churning out 34k in 3-4 months—and I have yet to achieve that level of zen again, and I wonder if that has kind of created the oroboros that has been my mental health the last couple of years…
Current theory is that the creative mind just needs to think, and without something to think about, it becomes sort of self-referential and self-obsessed to the point of self-destruction. Like this can’t be a wholly original experience lol.
