Where Did All My Talent Go?

Well the rush had to end at some point, didn't it? After weeks of streamrollering through one collage after another and my mind being an endless wellspring of ideas, my imagination has dried up and with it my motivation. It was a good run while it lasted. Suddenly I not only have not a lick of ideas, save for those mediocre ones that I keep trying to make worthwhile to no avail, but I really have very little interest in even working on anything at all. It isn't that my current ideas are particularly bad, it's just that they all seem forced and artificial. I do have a piece that I was working on and which was coming along nicely prior to this creative crash and now I've become somehow physically uncoordinated and clumsy with it, so it has been safely tucked away from any damage I could do to it in my current state and will remain so until I'm back to my old self once more. I know these spells come with the territory of being an artist or a writer or anyone whose job is to create, but they still really suck when they happen. The best thing is to just let it be until the juices start to bubble again, but it's a real bummer while you're waiting to once more feel like yourself, especially when you're currently feeling all fuzzy and lazy and (nearly) completely disinterested in art. I say "nearly" because there are still embers of my creative self in here and they occasionally flair up and I think "this is a great idea" and I start to work on it, only to flounder and stumble over the details, abandon the piece and then ultimately give in to the inertia once again. And the self-doubt that can eat away at you during prolonged periods of block are the worst part of it. That nasty little depressive voice that worms its way insidiously into your psyche and tells you things like: "You have no talent anyways so who are you kidding?", and "All your work is nothing but crap so it doesn't matter if all you do is watch TV all day" and "what if this never ends and you never work again?" and the queen mum of them all "If you were a real artist you wouldn't have to struggle so much." And as awful as it is, I know there isn't a thing I can do to speed this along and bring it to an end, beyond not panicking and giving in to this block and all its ugliness. It's almost an organic thing with a life of its own that needs to run its rotten course until that part of my brain that makes art that's sometimes worth looking at and that frequently buzzes with images of what I'm going to create next wakes up and functions again fluidly and without hindrance.