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Several months ago I found myself in a funk. An energy funk. And I didn’t know how to get out of it. I was completely exhausted. I’m sure you know this exhaustion—the one that came in waves throughout the pandemic. Adam Grant is an organisational psychologist at Wharton gave it both language and meaning. In his New York Times article, ‘Feeling Blah During the Pandemic’ he says, “[The feeling]...wasn’t burnout—we still had energy. It wasn’t depression—we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.” You may well have felt this too and perhaps it’s hung around into your 2022—continually assaulted by the news, a constant hum of low-level anxiety, because no one quite knows what was around the corner. Heaped on top of my feelings of languishing and flatness was frustration. I was frustrated with myself. I was frustrated at my lack of motivation and my lack of creativity. Especially because, being cooped up at home it felt like I had more time than ever before, more time to write, to create.
On one particular Saturday morning, after three or four weeks of this flatness, sitting on my sofa, I began to muse. “It’s just so weird that I don’t have the energy to do the thing that gives me energy.” I paused. Then I thought, “What if I gave this writing thing a go, for just twenty minutes, in spite of my languishing?” So, wearing my ‘flatness’ sweats, I mosied into my home office and plonked myself in front of my computer. I cracked my knuckles, like a concert pianist, and began tapping away. Well, actually, that’s not completely true.
I’ve been writing a middle grade novel for the last eighteen months and it’s been a life source for me during the craziness of this pandemic, giving me hope and tremendous energy. There’s one particular passage toward the end of the novel that’s like a king-hit to my gut—it sets my heart on fire and this might sound weird, because I wrote it, but I get teary-eyed every time I read it. So, on this particularly flat Saturday, I scrolled straight to that passage, read over it and WHOOSH! I was hit with a wave of energy. In that very moment I was reminded that this piece of work still had life, because it gave me some. I proceeded to write and edit for an hour. Sure, I was mentally exhausted after that hour, but my creative spirit was energised.
For you it might be a particular scene in a film, a song, a piece of art or even a piece of cake and it does something to your insides (hopefully not indigestion!), but can I suggest you find what might revitalise you with energy and then consume it. I believe in the principle of sowing and reaping and I was fortunate enough to reap a rush of energy after a few moments of sowing. You might find that the five minute investment, sowing into your energy and your creativity, changes everything, stilling the sense of languishing and revitalising your art. Sometimes all it takes is a crack of the knuckles and the audacity to try.
