Over the past month, I seem to have misplaced my motivation. I am usually at least fairly motivated to accomplish most things, but these past few weeks, I find that I am much as this picture suggests, just here. Doing nothing, with nothing to say, and feeling quite like just a lump of unmotivated flesh.
Sure I have ideas about things I could do. They come all the time and I look at them and ponder how I might bring them to life and that’s about where it stops. I just don’t have the motivation or inspiration to proceed further.
I could force myself to do it. I can write anytime, but it would be just words without conviction or passion. I could paint, but it would be perfunctorily done without true art or expression. I could organize my house or do some deep cleaning, but I would rather rest.
Now, it is not as if I do nothing at all. I get up every day and work a 10 to 12 hour day at the business I own and run providing mental health counseling to girls and women five days a week and every other week adding on half days on Saturday. I supervise a therapist who is gaining her hours for licensure every day. I do all the things required to run a business every day. And I am very good at my job.
I have a family with a husband and three sons, adults all, but they still all live in the home with me and I am engaged with each of them on a variety of levels every day during and after my work. I do clean my home and cook meals mostly on weekends as after a 10-12 hour day with mental health I do not have the margin for that every day.
I have friends that I talk to and engage with as often as possible. Less now with Covid but I am still engaged with them as best we can.
I do many other things weekly in conjunction with running and marketing a business. I engage in family activities such as games and movies. So, I am not doing nothing.
However, my creative endeavors have suffered dramatically over the last month perhaps even longer. I have written and published things online but it was without much creativity. I have not painted outside of my therapy practice using art therapy in months. I have not written a single word on the book series I am working on in months.
Even today as I write this there are lots of ideas in my head for things I could write about. How I am hooked into the Netflix series The Last Kingdom and am on my second watch through of the four seasons. How I think Bridgerton could have been written by someone in a coma as it is that predictable and trite. How the NFL offseason is going to be a carousel of quarterback trades and changes. How Tom Brady continues to defy time. And I have all kinds of ideas for painting as well.
But nothing moves me to actual creation of any of this. I feel drained, tired, and dare I say it, lazy. And lazy is not a word I am familiar with. Of all the words I and others would use to describe me, lazy is not one of them.
Perhaps it is winter, but we have barely had any real winter this year in our part of Montana. Perhaps it is the start of a new year and the feeling that time is flying by. Perhaps it is the experience of my 58th birthday. Perhaps it is ongoing Covid and political unrest.
Perhaps it just a season of time where I take a creative rest. I am not sure but I am not enjoying it. Though I do not know how to get out of it and start the flow again. I hope that it does.
I do believe that nothing stays the same and that this too will change…when the universe is ready.
Deborah Horton Writing 