I just spent nearly an hour going through my dented and decrepit filing cabinet searching for a poem. It was something I wrote in my high school English class, easily the best of the dozens of pieces I presented over the course of my time there. See, my English teacher was very unconventional; where most were teaching proper sentence structure and punctuation, mine focused on his students’ creativity. Our usual day consisted of listening to songs or poems or quotes and expressing our thoughts and feelings about the subject, oftentimes through our own poetry. Sometimes I simply couldn’t find the words and instead elected to draw a picture, which he always took under consideration equally.

Before you ask, no I didn’t find that poem, but I found a number of my old notebooks filled with the pictures and stories that occupied my mind when I should have been studying. The top drawer held things from when I was just a boy, things inspired by the games and cartoons I was into at the time. I had forgotten how easily I put pen to page back then, if something was on my mind I drew it or wrote it with abandon. I found an old story I remember bandying about with my friends, the amazing adventures of a character I painstakingly named “Haritcah.” Aside from that were stories of aliens and sentient insects and space ninjas. The bottom drawer held memories from my teens. Seems like I was more interested in drawing than writing at that time though Haritcah somehow still made an appearance. I sifted through pages of, honestly, interesting art I didn’t remember doing. There were a number of pictures of my own hand that I did remember, I don’t know why I was practicing hands so much but I was doing pretty well.

After that, hardly anything. I guess by that time I was in college chasing a Biology degree, that I ended up giving up on, simply because it was my best subject. The piece “Auriel” I posted was the result of world history class with a rather unusual teacher who wanted us to write about living in the failing Roman Empire. I still took art classes when I had the chance but didn’t come out of them with anything particularly interesting. After I transferred from community college to university I started to feel the itch to write again after seeing flyers for contests, but I never entered any. I made the foolhardy decision to drop out of college and work on my masterwork, a trilogy starting with a book called “Omniscience.” Obviously, I bit off more than I could chew, and I lacked the courage to try something like this blog to put myself out into the world.

As I returned my memories to the file cabinet I thought to myself, What’s different? Part of that question I’ve answered already, I just got fed up with being me, being afraid, and wanted to step out. The other part has yet to be answered: What happened to my creativity, my imagination? The whole reason I was digging through my past was because I, in the present, couldn’t think of what to write today. I even visited an art museum earlier thinking it might inspire me, but as I sat at lunch staring at the blank post on my phone, it was obvious my plan hadn’t been successful. Has my creativity been damaged? Has it merely gone dormant? Am I completely blowing this out of proportion and not considering the fact that this is all very new and I just need to get used to writing like this? As I get on my knees before my keyboard because my cat (yes, that cat) just stole my chair, I look forward to finding the answer, to finding my creativity again. God bless.