Things have been super busy for months. Rarely a breather with projects and pitches and summer activities and getting the kids settled in school and…you don’t need me to explain. You’ve probably been living it too. For me, it’s during those jam-packed stretches when random inspiration constantly strikes. That’s when an article practically writes itself in my head. A chapter of a book I’ve been banging away at for ages comes to me in the middle of the night. Not in a dream, but in that sweaty, fretful time between 2 and 4 am. (Shoutout to all my midlife female friends. Meet you at 3 am in Anxietyville? I’ll bring the melatonin.)
Point is, so much inspiration, so little time.
And then the seasons changed. Literally and figuratively. The temperatures dropped and so did my workload. Suddenly, I’m looking at empty slots on my calendar! Entire days with only one meeting! Time to FINALLY work on the pet projects that I’ve been jazzed about for months. So I took a couple days to recoup, and then…nothing.
Zippo.
It’s like my brain is suddenly a dried apricot.
The inspiration has left the building.
The prompt was: An apricot leaving the building. (Obvs.)
Those two analogies don’t even go together. The second one’s actually a simile. Yet, I’m not going to fix them.
In Between big projects. In Between fast deadlines. In Between the familiar energy that comes from knowing all the people are relying on me for all the things. And so now with room to breathe, instead of carpeing the diem, I can’t motivate myself for shit. All the passion projects I want to bring to life, the book ideas that whisper to me in the middle of the night, even the pictures that are sitting on the floor outside my office, begging to be hung, have gone quiet. They’re like, “yeah, whatevs. We’re just fine down here. We don’t feel like doing anything either.”
While I know it’s temporary, the In Betweens create a vicious cycle. Because when I’m not putting my gnawing creativity to good use, when I’m not taking precious opportunities to dive into the things that I know light me up, (or will light me up if I keep polishing them) I feel crappy. Stagnant. Like I’m wasting my potential. And feeling blah is not the father or mother or even second cousin of invention. It’s the enemy.
Part of me feels like I shouldn’t admit this out loud. We’re so trained to celebrate our successes and keep the stuckness to ourselves. To equate busyness and productivity with importance and relevance. Downtime, even a little of it, has become a dirty word. Yet I know I’m not alone. It’s the nature of our business, and life, to have cycles. And working through those valleys and creative blocks is part of the job of every creative and every leader, for that matter. So I guess this piece is an effort to climb out of the In Betweens and get a solid foothold back in the place where I’m feeling my usual energy and inspiration.
If you’re having a case of the In-Betweens too, I’m reaching my hand out. Grab hold and we’ll help each other across.
Maybe we start by hanging some pictures? Or eating dried apricots. I’m suddenly motivated to do both, and that feels better already.