I know you’re waiting for me, you’re waiting for me to come to visit you. It’s been a while, I know. I’m sorry. You’re waiting for me to tell you your future and let you experience what you’ve begun. I’ll be honest with you, I’m waiting too.
The truth is my mind hasn’t been feeling too good. It feels ill most days, and it’s sometimes hard to put on my creative mind and allow myself to imagine; most days my mind feels like an old, worn-out, item of clothing, or a loved and weathered old teddy bear. I often feel as if it’s time to just throw out my brain and get a new one – if only that was an option!
I know if I was to chuck my brain in the bin, I’d throw you out with it, and that’s not something I want to do. It pains me to imagine not visiting you. I miss you. I need you in my life to function, which is strange to think about, but you help me figure out my own life within your fictional ones.
The most difficult thing about living with the sadness I find myself lumbered with right now, is missing your world. I can’t freely walk through the door and enter as I used to. I would sit down and wander around your world as if it were as real as my own – but when the real world feels slightly surreal, it’s hard to find your feet in another.
My mind feels much like a bicycle with stabilisers on right now, it’s functioning as it should, but only because there are other things around it keeping it upright. If I try to leave my world and enter yours, well I fear my stabilisers will fall off. Their tiny wheels might get stuck in the door frame and I’d fall off and embarrass myself, while breaking the bike at the same time.
It gets lonely over here. Very lonely actually, but I think for once I need to be in the loneliness and not get lost in your world – I think I might have been hiding in your world, which I have adored over the last few years, but did I lose myself in you, to make myself feel better? Yes. I know it would work again, but I think it’s important that I don’t lose myself anywhere right now. Mind, how can I lose myself when I’m already lost to begin with?
I’ll be back, in my mind, in reality, and within your story. I will finish your life story, I will give you the things you want (and the things you most certainly don’t want too, because what kind of writer would I be if I granted all of your wishes?!) and I will release you into the wild, I promise, I just need to get lost in my own reality for a while.
Yours sincerely, my mind.
Not a day goes by when I don’t think about my characters. What I want to write, what I want them to do, and what I still need to do to be able to set my characters free in the minds of others. I find that there is a fine line between depressed and okay, where my writing thrives, but I think I’m too far in the depressed half of the scale right now and I’m finding it difficult.
This is the most I have managed to write in a long time. Just sitting down and not forcing something from my mind, to my fingers, to my page and then to your eyes. It feels quite jarring to feel such difficulty doing something I love so much.
Have you ever tried to open a bottle of bubble bath from a Christmas gift set (Usually a Baylis and Harding one, I’m not going to lie), but the foil part under the lid won’t tear off? So you pull and push until you tear a tiny hole in it and pour from that? Maybe that is a very niche metaphor, but that’s how my mind feels right now. I could pour a metaphorical bottle of bubbles into the bath of my life, but it would take so long to do, and it wouldn’t even really feel worth it in the end, because the bubbles would probably be pitiful anyway.
I am never going to take a break from writing my blog, or attempting to think creatively, because I don’t want to lose it; I need it, but right now, it’s a very slow process.
…this post feels much like a pitiful bath of pathetic bubbles, but it’s about all I can muster from my exhausted mind. My creativity will be awoken again soon, and I will be back to writing blog posts that have some kind of silver-lining conclusion, but I guess the reality is that sometimes things are just a bit rubbish and don’t have a silver-lining; that’s life in all its rubbish-y glory, isn’t it?
Gwen Richards 