Chrys Sterling

In short, I don’t know.

There’s this sort of paralyzing anxiety that I and a lot of other creators I know get when it comes to producing Original Content(TM) that gets in the way of… Basically everything! The desire to be perfect and the logical acknowledgement but subconscious refusal of the fact that your first time creating something isn’t going to BE that is a difficult idea soup to reconcile with. And yet, we have to try.

So! That’s what I’m doing. This site is a professional enough platform, I used it to publish podcasts for two years, and now I’ll be doing this! I don’t know if I’d call this so much a blog or a diary, it’s moreso me picking a fight with myself in public so I can’t hide half written scraps of fiction and essays in the same WIP folder as my fanfics that I’ll never touch again. My will to create is almost directly proportional to how bad I think it will be if I fail hitting a deadline, and for that to be true it means I can’t really set that deadline myself most times. I’ve got some suspicions as to why this is, but I’m planning on keeping them under wraps until I’ve got further confirmation. Until then, I’ll just continue climbing up this metaphorical cliff, yelling that I’ll do a metaphorical cannonball until people show up until I have to pay the piper.

I wrote a thinkpiece sounding title for this, so I feel I might have to live up to that vibe.

Here we go.

I was actively creating a large project prior to Covid-19. A lot of people joked that they’d finally planned on getting their lives together before that threw a wrench into their plans, but in my case that was actually pretty close to home. I’d gotten a performance-based pay raise my corporate job, I had a reasonable work/life balance, I had created a habit for myself to write for several hours a day three days a week, and I was co-writing a horror narrative podcast with someone who’s now one of my best friends.

And then the world ended.

And that all crashed down.

Getting into a rhythm like that took a lot of effort and motivation that was built up over a long period of time. It took a therapist who was willing to give me time to open up, be on my side when I needed it, and also call me on my shit and hold me accountable to the goals I had set for myself. It also had to come from a time and place where I didn’t mind what I did to pay my bills and I wasn’t burned out beyond belief. And now that I’m without all these things, it’s difficult to stand again. Maybe even moreso, as now I have a fully realistic picture of what I look like when I’m “functional” to compare my current state to.

There’s an important factor in all of this though. I still have the desire to create. I’ve never once lost that. I lost motivation to work on certain projects, lost faith in things I previously believed in, lost interest in living more than a few times, but never lost this stupid, pain in my ass urge to make something that touches even one person in a way that matters so that I can have some nonsensical proof that I was here and at least it wasn’t all bad.

So for right now, I’m learning coding, I’m trying to get out of a corporate job that is burning my soul out of my body, and I’m trying to find things that I think are interesting and worth getting invested in. I’m trying a lot of new things and many of them are not easy for me, and it’s forcing me to confront areas of myself that are a little difficult to look at, but that’s okay.

In short, I don’t know at what point I’ll really be Ready(TM) to create, but I sure am about to pick a fight with myself in public about it regardless. I can figure the rest out as I go.

With love(?),
Chrys