Flow State

How do you keep at the thing you love?

Earlier this week, I was searching for an old post from Six Until Me, the one where I first used “rage bolus.” (I eventually found it in my hard drive archives, back from October 2005. Posted it again here.) I wrote so much back then. Like goofy amounts. Effortlessly. As soon as my fingers hit the keyboard, it was like they were filled with electricity. It coursed through me, all inspiration and chaos and not giving a single, solitary fuck about what anyone thought about what I was writing. I didn’t know what to say all the time, but it didn’t matter and I said whatever I wanted, for better or for worse. It was cringey diabetes diary writing, it was peak confidence-shielded-by-youth.

It was super fun.

It was flow.

I have a very clear memory of an email I received from a reader who asked about something I was writing, amidst weeks of work-related travel, and she said something along the lines of, “I don’t know how you do it all. I’m in my 40s and I’m lucky if I even read all my emails in a week.”

And I felt so good about that, so efficient and highly creative and my brain felt like it had limitless power. It was like the moment when He-Man raises his sword while standing in front of the impossibly badass Castle Grayskull and says (half yelling, half proclaiming in that He-Man way), “I ... have ... the power!!!”

And then a bunch of time went by. And a bunch of things happened. And the flow waned.

Now I’m the one deep into my 40s and lucky if I even read all my emails in a week, standing in front of a pile of laundry to be sorted, on hold with the insurance company for the 46th minute in a row, my arm half-raised holding an iced coffee, proclaiming, “I ... have ... forgotten why I came into this room!!”

Creativity used to come to me in waves daily, like the actual tides. I used to write a daily blog post and poems would pop fully-formed into my head and ideas for creative ventures spilled into a repository in my brain not unlike how the ice machine in the freezer dumps freshly frozen ice cubes into the tray. My word count was frigging epic.

I now have creative Perigean Spring Tides, which I learned about after Googling “what tides happen infrequently.” Perigean Spring Tides happen when the moon is closest to the Earth and the happen like four times in a year. Sounds aligned with my spluttering creative fits.

The creative spark feels like an uphill climb right now, but there are reasons.

Sleep hates visiting me. The news cycle makes me want to breathe into a paper bag on the regular. The estrogen patch on my hip is not doing enough to put words back into my brain. The current algorithm favors negative clickbait so I’m seeing ten emails about How You’re Never Going to Cut It in Trad Publishing that take the wind out of my writing sails (sales). And sometimes diabetes is a rotten little crumb like the other night when I was low four times over the course of six hours and my alarms were singing out like an unmated male Northern Mockingbird. (Google it. They loud.) Add in stupid adult chores like dishes and grocery shopping and dealing with medical insurance and cleaning the litter box and crying in the shower.

Ha! I’m not crying in the shower. You’re crying in the shower!¹ But weirdly, the shower is one of the only places where ideas come to me. The shower, where there isn’t any paper. Or in the car, also a paper-free zone, where I’m compelled to send a voice memo to myself in effort to retain the thought. Or just as I’m falling asleep at night, which prompts me to send a text message to myself with the idea spores. Sometimes it’s a fully fleshed out idea.

Sometimes, it’s a four line stanza jump scare from a unfinished poem about a hamburger wondering who his parents are.

texty proof

Nothing in the upstairs region of my head is firing at capacity and yet I’m still trying to take charge.

I was listening to a podcast this morning while putting away 10,000 spoons (while only needing a knife) and the host was talking about the “The Emotional Toll on Writers in the Modern Landscape.” It was served as a “You Might Like” podcast, and the title caught my attention because I’m struggling to Be Productive and also To Focus.

Of course there’s an emotional toll to writers! To humans in general. The hydra tentacles of AI are hard to ignore, easy to hate, and even if you cut one off, another version grows in its place. Value on creative output seems diminished in the spaces where I thought it would flourish. The aforementioned algorithm rewards rage and hot takes.

But what if people don’t want to have a public-facing opinion on everything? And what if they shouldn’t?

I keep coming back to this hope that the flow is still in me, somewhere. That it can be coaxed out by surrounding myself with fellow writers, fellow creatives, fellow people who aren’t afraid to keep trying. That it’s not about perfect prose but Sloppy Joe word sandwiches but the stories that only I can tell. Even if they’re weird. Or take a long time to get on the page.

How do you keep at the thing you love? The thing that isn’t rooted in partners or children or employment or money but identity, the core of who you are at the deep melty center of you. The thing that isn’t as important as taxes or prescription refills but important enough to keep you awake at night, the sound of your hopeful heartbeat thundering in your ears as you realize you know exactly where the hamburger’s parents are.

…

This is all to say that you can do this. Whatever your creative aspiration is. Just don’t give up, even when you’re flailing. Or when you’re repetitive.

Or repetitive.

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1. We’re all crying in the shower.