Halted halfway

We all have a notebook.

You know, that notebook. Perhaps not a notebook per se, but somewhat equivalent - full of lost thoughts, shower ideas and tiny sparks. A place for things that are not really born yet, but also not entirely dormant. Maybe it's sitting in a dusty corner in your head, maybe in your phone's notes, maybe even scattered around a number of post-its you don't remember where you stored. Half-baked unborn creations.

Creativity is not a mysterious god-given talent. It takes work, practice, tons (and I mean TONS) of references and exhaustive resilience. The best way to stay creative is arguably to never reject your own ideas, no matter how critical you might be of them. It takes a shitload of bad ideas to find a good one. Fill pages and pages of your notebook with bad and good and lukewarm creations. It exercises the right muscles, and hurts just like getting back to the gym.

But there is a stage, a stage beyond the notebook, that I dread the most: the desertion.

Say you pick something on your notebook. Yes, that one; you like it. It tips more to good than lukewarm and you feel excited - that's the one. With some elbow grease you kickstart it into life. It's not a note in a page anymore, it is something, a real thing. And some time after, it stops being something. Motivation, or time, or - how ironic - creativity dies down. There is no room to work on this something, there is no more grease to put on this elbow. Desertion: when a project dies, or goes into hibernation.

We all have those, too - some of us more than others, myself included. Funny enough for this type of creative individual, the constant process of adding things to our notebooks, picking one and unraveling it, realizing we don't have the energy to bring it to life and starting all over again is not all bad. To be honest, it is one of my creative pet peeves. I love hating this process, I love going through it so I can complain about it. Falling in love for an idea and obsessing over it for some time, until I don't anymore. And then jumping to another one with equal passion and recklessness. It works for me in particular as an experiment of sorts, an endless parade of new sparks that don't ever sit still. A way to exercise the muscles and hurt after getting back to the gym.

No rights or wrongs. No conclusions here. Maybe today's issue, too, was doomed to desertion.

-Maíra