When Creativity Fails, What Do I Do?

There are people who are always saying…it’s not the destination that matters…it’s the journey. I admit I have said it or thought it many times.

When it comes to creativity, it’s the damn destination I get caught up in. The journey is all angst and work and trail and error. If the destination isn’t fucking spectacular, the shame and doubt spiral is massive.

Take the zine I made. I sold three. Three…over two days. And one of them was bought by my friends. All weekend I worried and stressed about it. I kept making deals with myself. What would make me happy? What can I live with? My lowest number was ten. I thought it was a reasonable number. The zine cost about $1. I figured even written in English some people would pick it up because it was fun and interesting.

But that was a big fat nope.

I was shattered. Add this to my already fragile state with the lack of acceptances for my short stories and my collection, I was ready to say fuck it to everything and dump it all. This website. My submitted work. My attempts to get shit published. Cut off my hair. You know the usual crisis of self. I couldn’t even talk to anyone about it. I just couldn’t put it into words so I let myself drink some gin and let it all just stew in my brain.

I was eventually able to get myself back out of the depths of despair. I was able to realize that I was making too much out of something so small as a tiny little zine I made in English for a Japanese audience. An audience that is notorious for reading things and not paying. They will literally stand at the magazine racks in convenience stores and read entire manga and magazines without paying for them. I can’t be expected to shake them out of that habit with a cute story about some Hawaiian woman who wears flowers in her hair. Also, some people didn’t sell a single copy. That could have been me. It could have been much worse.

So when my creativity fails, when my destination is less than spectacular, when I want to quit everything and be and do nothing, I climb out of the pit I dug for myself and I just keep journeying because it’s obvious that I chose the wrong destination in the first place.