Oh hey there. I didn’t notice you come in to my readerspace. Glad to see you. Pull up a metaphorical chair, grab yourself a theoretical drink from the existental bar, and relax.

Just for a change, let’s talk about me and my psychological issues.

I realized today that the primary thing keeping me from realizing my real creative potential is my unwillingness to be inspired.

Or rather, my unwillingness to let inspiration move me. I am inspired all the time. I get all kinds of amazing, wonderful, creative ideas, and it makes me feed good to get them.

But they don’t go anywhere. I just stuff them away somewhere in my brain with the vague notion that I will use them “some day”, and that is it.

Basically, I am an idea hoarder. Having them and stuffing them away gives me a feeling of warmth and security. It is like the feathers that should become feathers in my cap instead go to further feathering my nest against the cold and unfeeling world.

One would think my nest would be damn well feathered by now. And it is. And yet, I still feel cold.

Maybe the cold is not coming from outside the nest.

And why do my ideas never (well, hardly ever) move me to do something creative? Because nothing moves me to do anything, more or less. I have such a deep emotional inertia that almost nothing can convince me to suddenly do something I was not planning to do, something out of the ordinary, not part of my usual routine, not something I have had time to think about and adjust to and move my energies into.

Certainly, no mere internal impulse is going to break the doldrums. I am emotionally dependent on the hyper predictable ordered life of sameness and nothingness and boringness that my life has been for a long time. I might complain about how my life has slipped away from me for my entire adult life, and how dull and unfulfilling and pointless my life is, but I truly fear change of any sort with a fear that lives way, way below the conscious, intelligent level.

So I can not, it seems, generate the sort of change I crave from within, even though every pop psych book in the world tells you that this is only way it can ever happen. If opportunity just happened to fall intop my lap, I would probably pull my shit together enough to take advantage of it.

But left to my own devices, nothing happens.

Because as it turns out, I have truly terrible devices.

In some ways, I would love to be the sort of person who gets truly inspired. It would be great to be the sort of writer who gets an idea and is so full of the spirit of the idea and enthusiasm for its execution that he simply must run to the computer and write the thing before he can do anything else. Someone for whom creativity is a driving passionate force that drives them to release their brilliance upon the world and build up a massive body of work and huge success.

But, you know, not if it is all sudden or anything. I don’t do sudden very well.

And that is the problem, isn’t it? A lot of life is sudden. You go with the moment or life leaves you behind. And so far, life has left me so far behind that I am starting to wonder if I will meet it coming up from behind me some day.

If I do, I will probably just get out of the way, watch it go by, shrug, sigh, and continue to go nowhere fast. I mean, it’s not like there was anything I could have done, right?

Life is not helping at the moment. Or maybe it is. I am going through a period of hyposomnia, where I just cannot seem to get to sleep or even get particularly sleepy. It is the exact negative of those days when I sleep all day. I must be living on one seriously weird long unstable circadian clock due to my shut in lifestyle.

And the thing about not being able to sleep is that it means lots and lots and lots of time to fill, and a chance to get really god damned bored and tired of your stupid fucking life.

But this can be a good thing. Discontent is the herald of change, and perhaps if I am lucky, this dissatisfaction will gnaw through the layers of callous and rust inside me like a rat desperately trying to gnaw its way to freedom, and lead me to the sort of personal change I both crave and fear.

Certainly, there are pressures building and growing inside me, and I am doing my best not to fight them, but to let them change me. It is not an easy process, and the increasingly erratic nature of my internal moodscape is deeply frightening to me.

But the more rigid you are, the harsher the conditions of change become and more you are setting yourself up for disaster when change becomes necessary, all in the name of predictability, stability, and order. The tougher the dam, the more violent the flood when it breaks. You have to have the flexibility to change when the time comes.

And arguably, for me, the time came ages ago. It came, in fact, way back in 1992 or so, when my parents told me they were taking me out of university. That would have been the time to decide just what the hell I wanted out of life after that, what kind of person I wanted to be and what I wanted to make out of the materials delivered to me by fate.

Instead, I just went back to my hometown, and sank into depression, and I have not come back out of it since. Maybe I never will.

But I hope I do.