I am a impulsive and emotional content creator

Which is why I could never be a real content creator

I am quite literally writing this to you because I just had this realization and now I feel the urge to have it written down somewhere. Since I was a teenager I could feel it becoming a pattern and I knew I should break it.

Yet here I am 10 years later, still being charged to create only when I feel the impulse to do so.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

There was an episode of Spongebob when he had to write and essay and spent the whole episode spiraling

All he had written down was the word “The” thinking that it would just flow from there and into the most prophetic essay he’s ever written in his bikini bottom life.

He ends up leaving his house, having a whole experience, before the sponge started to sponge and absorb the information he needed to write.

But all that time lost, all the time Spongebob was biting his toes off to come up with something that wasn’t there is me when you tell me to create or brainstorm when I don’t feel compelled to do so.

All I got is “The”

It started with poetry

But don’t we all?

It begins with something happening or someone hurting you and then you’re hurt, and that hurt needs to be translated somewhere but you have no padded walls to silence your screams or access to run out and break something and you’re certainly too asthmatic to believe you’ll start running your emotions away. So you grab a pen and you start to write.

I wrote tons of poems in my teen years.

But any time I would want to write something else just for practice, thoughts failed me. My inaction would lead me to stare at a blank page with nothing but the word “The”

and I hated myself for it

because right then I had a sunken feeling that this pattern I’ve been on is going to stay and someone was going to have to give me a class on how to shake out of it.

When I began to stop writing as much

Because it's not that I can’t create unless the idea comes to me at 9am in a dream just as I’m waking up and will forever doom myself if I forget in the next 30 minutes or if the experience I just had brought me to absolute tears that the only way I know how to dry them up is to start drafting a storyboard.

It is simply the fact that without my “ah ha” moment or suddenly immobile because of my silent rage, anything that I might create will just not be as good as I would like it to be or not even be created at all.

Not creating means you lose momentum not just with yourself but your audience

Some of the most renowned works from artists come from their deepest wounds, their darkest periods, turning their trauma into a visual depiction. This is not uncommon.

But I hate that some of my best ideas come from my deep suffering.

I could never be a content creator because of this pattern.

My blog has been empty for months, my YouTube a non-starter, my TikTok consistently inconsistent. If there is no itch to scratch to create, my other ideas may not be as fully committed to, and I would hate to do that to myself because when I create I do it for me, and if I’m not watching it, if I’m not reading it, then I have no reason to put it out there.

And so my engagement never picks up, my followers don’t increase, even the practice that I could give myself turns into a tutorial again, because I don’t put in the work if there is no kick.

So tell me: what can I do to break this curse?

Because the time in my life where I need ideas to churn is starting now and I don’t know what kind of creator I am without that push. Is it a mindset? New strategies? I’m becoming afraid I’ll never become where I want to be.

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