On the 400th Day, She Wrote Again

A (hyperbolic?) ramble on my creative coma, resuscitating my imagination, and the creative constraints of social media and the online world. Oh, and a little announcement too.

For over a year, writing has been as frustrating as the process of getting dressed before a first date. The words don’t fit right, the metaphors are mismatched. I walk away from my computer after combing through the ideas hanging in my mind and leave the page naked. Not feeling capable of accessing my creativity led to feeling unworthy of sharing whatever shreds of thought I could muster up, which gave way to not feeling inspired. Not wanting to endure the pain of the process, I avoided writing outside of my paid work and inevitably slipped into a creative coma—one that cultivated space for a deep fear to germinate in my mind.

What if this dip in creativity is permanent?

What if I’m entering a new chapter of my creative life—one that’s devoid of a desire to write?

Who am I if I can’t or don’t want to write anymore?

I fear my imagination has been so neglected that it’s wilted like the house plants I regularly forget to water. My writing practice has been on life support, and I’ve been close to pulling the plug for good. I should just let it die. No one will miss it. But this line of thinking is heartless. If I let my inconsistency and the fear of being average keep me from writing, then my creativity will inevitably be executed by my own inaction. And if I allow my imagination to slip into a state of rigor mortis, then other parts of myself will die too.

But breathing creative life back into myself doesn’t mean simple CPR. It means resuscitating the very mechanism of my creativity: my imagination. And this requires action, a bit of pain. I must sift through all the cheap shit that floats to the surface. Pickaxe in hand, I have to go deeper, down into the mines of my mind, allow myself to gasp for new air, cough up bad ideas, churn out some shit, and gag at the stench of mediocrity. So here I am, resurfacing despite having nothing original to say, allowing my name to once more pop up in the inboxes of readers like you who likely forgot they subscribed to such a thing in the first place.

LeCount Hollow Beach in December / Wellfleet, Cape Cod, MA

When I was in college, everything compelled me to create. I couldn’t go on a walk without being drawn to take a photo and immediately manipulate the composition until the image became a new piece of art all its own. Writing literary analysis essays for hours didn’t feel like a chore but a necessity. Driving in the car, I’d think aloud, string together words to form potential poems for poems and commit them to memory so I could make them permanent in a notebook when I got back home. Eventually, I started orating and recording myself to ensure no idea was lost. Over the years, this impulse lessened. Perhaps being removed from the collective creative environment that was college loosened an essential cord that powered my creativity.

Still, I had just enough creative juice to find a story in a fleeting moment during the quiet lull of a bartending shift or in how the light would shift in a room. Now, it feels like even the big life events—like moving or my mom’s dual cancer diagnosis—are always just a fingertip too far away to meaningfully articulate and creatively grasp. Frankly, trying to write through these types of experiences feels too cliché, trite, and overwrought. Perhaps I need to digest these facets of my life more fully to truly feel them. But I haven’t stopped living, so why do I feel like I have nothing to say about my experience, no matter what stage of understanding I’m in? In all honesty, maybe I do have something to say, but my deepest fear is that what I say won’t be perceived as valuable or worth a reader’s time.

As a scroller of social media and a reader of online publications, I’ve noticed that spending too much time online has a vampiric effect on my imagination and creative soul. Since undertaking the task of writing articles for algorithms to drink up, I’ve come to a dark conclusion. The online sphere is a serpent that will strangle the creative life out of you. Being sucked up in the cycle of online consumption and production has thrown off my internal creative compass, elbowed out any room for my natural creativity to thrive, and supplanted my imagination with mundane mush. Having to regularly create and cater to the demands of the online world has revealed how consumerism and social media have set in motion a force that I fear may crush our collective creative soul.

Social media breeds an air of impatience. Quantity and profit have won out over quality. The consumer expects novelty with every refresh of a page and publications have brand deals to uphold, ad revenue to generate, and competitors to rank higher above. Brands and content creators have no choice but to cut corners to meet creative demands. To keep creating content at such a fast pace, perfectionism—the idea of it that oftentimes motivates us to refine and sit with something for a while—is no longer viable, although deeply necessary.

Ideas aren’t given the time to take root and grow to their full potential anymore; often the same seeds are planted to mimic another’s garden. When this type of creativity is nurtured and the product of this process is consumed consistently, tastes change. What we make should be anticipated, consumed, and savored like a multi-course meal, and gorging on bite-sized and drive-thru fare has changed our expectations. We’ve become hungry for cheap content. Content creation is now akin to fast fashion. So much of what we read, watch, and listen to is equivalent to a cheap Zara dress, and it’s all thanks to social media algorithms and the trend cycles they pick up and perpetuate. They shape all industries, products, branding, and marketing, and it’s contributing to how things of poor quality are being disguised as quality simply because they gained influence and popularity.

When things “go viral,” they become influential, but influence ultimately leads to a degradation in quality as others replicate it over and over again. As the saying goes, “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.” But now imitation is the greatest form of content. While inspiration in real life can lead to imitation and new interpretation, algorithms seem to only reward mimicry, which promotes plagiarism, sameness, standardization. Familiarity is favored—it’s what sells, what drives sales, what people gravitate toward, and so it’s what continues to be made. Creating from a place of imagination is no longer a requirement to get likes, views, and reactions. In some ways, it may be a detriment.

In an age consumed by the act of consumption, creating online has the potential to threaten creativity at its core. Adam Aleksic, author of the Substack The Etymology Nerd, wrote an article titled “the ‘contentification’ of culture” (highly suggest reading it). In it, he writes: “The word ‘content’ just means ‘something that is contained,’ the implication being that it’s held within the ‘medium’ of ‘social media.’ Anybody making things online is therefore there to produce content. But this premise is flawed. To me, ‘content’ is a means to an end, not the end itself.” And this is my gripe. The idea that everything is and should be made into content has lowered the bar for what it means to create. Since creativity inherently requires imagination and originality, I’m not sure true creativity can authentically and meaningfully exist within the containers and mediums we’ve created to share online.

If the online word is just a container, then the question is whether or not the container encourages authentic creativity. As it stands now, it seems to only be creating constraints and expectations that box creators in. Now, there is something to be said about creating with constraints in mind. Prompts, deadlines, and the like do wonders to help an artist narrow their focus and not revise to the point of undoing. However, the unnecessary urgency prompted by these platforms often rushes the creative process, which is why a lot of people in industries where they are pressured to make at rapid speed are defaulting to AI, as only a machine can meet creative demands on command. Humans can’t always be expected to express their creativity in a constrained amount of time, under specific guidelines that don’t always align with the natural process of what it means to create.

On second thought, maybe AI is the solution—it’s the only way to continue serving content at the speed and volume we’ve primed the consumer to expect. Plus, the majority of the content we encounter on our feed isn’t being actively consumed anyway, unless it grabs our attention using bells and whistles. Maybe we should just save the real stuff—the true labors of love—for the real world and let the robots entertain the masses online?

Social media and the internet have made it possible to see and share more content than we could ever consume, which means we’re more inclined to make and consume from a place of laziness. Being bombarded with this much stuff makes it that much harder to tune out and tune into ourselves. But we must unplug to give space for our creative minds to reboot and roam. Why can’t we all slow down and become accustomed once more to waiting? Anticipation leads to more active consumption when the time to engage comes. Long-form content also invites this level of mindful enjoyment. This is why, in my opinion, a good book or a movie will always be more satisfying and inspiring than a TikTok reel. Maybe you feel differently. Maybe my love for analog and long-form content makes me incompatible with this fast-paced world.

Creating solely for online spaces over the past year ignited in me this belief that creative success can only be achieved if I can make something well enough and meaningful enough fast enough. But that is not the only way to make something of value. What I create and how I choose to make it won’t be for everyone and won’t always fit into a creative package that’s delectably original while also satiating the algorithms that may be. (Or maybe this line of thinking is to save my ego from coming to terms with my own creative limitations and inadequacies.) Luckily, the digital realm is not the only platform to create and share. Print is still alive and well.

Through some serendipity and cosmic alignment, Brooks and I were introduced to Artypants Magazine (APM): a publisher of art, stories, and inspiration that features New England creatives. Over the winter, we were given the creative freedom to embark on our first collaborative writing project together and contribute a piece on another Cape Cod artist couple, Kai Potter and Eli Pasternak (@windmapsoutercape on Instagram), which will be available to read in Issue 03: Labyrinth.

In an age of being so online, print and the slow consumption of art and creative work are now more important than ever. What Editorial Director Maryann Gibbons and the team at APM are doing is so awesome. Each issue keeps expanding to share more in its pages—and pre-orders help make the magic possible. They are an essential part of covering development and printing costs, allowing the publication to focus on delivering its best issue yet. So, if you want to enjoy creative work offline and support me, Brooks, APM, and the fellow creatives featured in this issue, pre-order your 7x10 paper portal to enjoy this spring.

---