Author.

Get the creative juices flowing, they say.

She’s up at 3am again.

She was up at 1am also, couldn’t sleep. Too many ideas bouncing around in her mind. Too many dreams. Day and night. Haunting her. Absolving her of all her strength and discipline.

She managed to get a couple hours in between but now, as she yawns and rubs her eyes, irritated slightly by the dim light of her phone in the dark, she’s succumbing to the clutches of her need.

Photo by Nick Wright on Unsplash

She thought she was doing so well this time. Finally found that spark she needed to follow through, the self-awareness to push aside anything that got in her way.

But she was mistaken.

She hadn’t yet realized the difficulty this would bring. This clarity. This openness.

So here we are again, up hours before the sun, bleeding her thoughts into words whether she likes it or not, almost as if she’s captive to this widening bandwidth of creativity that she has no one to blame for but herself.

“To listen, to be open,” she asked, when a group of bible school students asked her what she needed them to pray for over her. With a hand on her chest and an open mind, she heard these people, these religious followers, as they asked how they could help her. Being vehemently anti-religious and rebelling against any idea of a supreme overlord, she could’ve just as easily passed them by, gave them the finger and yelled “Hail Satan!”

But she didn’t. She’d been leaning into her intuition lately and it felt right to have those willing to offer her some moment of their time, no matter the source. It felt right to be heard, for just a moment, by complete strangers. As they rested their palms on her shoulders and spoke her name, they prayed for her openness, for her to listen as well as to be heard.

The human contact, both physical and emotional, however brief and however misguided, was something she’d been looking for. To be seen. Something she’d been fighting against for years but was finally ready.

She thought she was ready.

She thought she could handle what this would all bring. This change. This evolution. She was open to it, afterall. Leaning into whatever guiding forces she noticed. Trusting her gut. Listening to her intuition.

But now, as she rather unwillingly basks in the dim glow of the screen, held hostage by the ideas clawing their way out of her, she feels even more lost than before.

It’s true, this process has opened up her ability to think, to create, and to imagine. She’s taken the flow of unproductive thoughts and put them where they need to be, giving her mind the freedom of movement it needed to mold creations, to bend and shape into a hundred different ideas as it pleases.

And it pleases often.

Too often.

She can’t keep up.

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