Wallowing

People try to tell me that I should create whenever I'm feeling down as it may take my mind and my heart off of things that are bringing me down. I appreciate them trying to get me to make things, but I always hesitate to make anything when I'm in that state. I derive pleasure from creating things but that's because I get to see them once they're complete and remember what it took for me to make them. I find that if I am bleeding when I make something, when I observe it once it's finished, I'll only see the blood.

While it is important for me personally to create things to help others escape, the act of realizing these things in my imagination is also an act of escapism. I already know in my heart that I'm a creator because I'm hurting for various reasons: because I don't see the world I'd like to live in, because I feel isolated from anyone else who might think or be like me, but most importantly in hard times, because I want to escape the current reality, a reality almost untouched by me. The kind of reality I aim to invent is not one that should boast about how broken its creator had to be to invent it.

I don't know.

Perhaps that is just an excuse I made for myself to avoid doing the hard work and opening Photoshop when I don't feel like it or for not finding the words to complete my chapter book when all the words I can summon are ones to express my pain. I don't think that's fair to the works I start. I've worked in places where they were harder on us if the boss was in a bad mood. My creations shouldn't have to struggle under the weight of my grief.

Rest in power.