Inspiration is a wet fish
And you know exactly what I mean
I must confess a couple of things. Firstly, I haven’t written a Substack in over two months. Secondly, and far more scandalously in my opinion, this unscheduled hiatus came almost as soon as I earned my first paid subscriber - you know who you are.
I could spin this web in a number of ways that might satisfy the spiders of guilt who scurry through the sticky folds of my brain:
My silence is a statement in itself.
I’ve been spending time with Buddhist monks, appreciating the art of letting go.
Wrapped up in the infinite present, I’ve neglected the faux-necessities of routine.
I could tell you all of this, and you’d be none the wiser.
Okay, I admit— the second one is ridiculous. My ego is far too bloated to spend time in a monastery and a vow of silence would no doubt lead to my untimely spontaneous combustion. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that there is no reason for my long silence.
At first, I didn’t want to write.
Then, I felt ashamed for my lack of writing.
And finally, it just felt like it’d been too long.
I felt like I’d lost momentum and nobody would care what I had to say and I didn’t necessarily feel bad about it. There, I said it. I wasn’t writing and I didn’t care.
But this has led me to a brief inquiry into the nature of inspiration and its intangible link to motivation. I think the latter comes first.
During these past two months in Sri Lanka, I haven’t felt motivated to write because I’ve been so content in my state of mind. We arrived in Colombo and on day one we found a tribe. When I say, ‘we found a tribe’, I’m not talking about a hippy, like-minded oneness. I’m talking about a group of six people who were travelling in the same direction. But, over the days and weeks, we became a tribe. We spent most of the days together, from morning until night, and we became intimately close to each other.
When you wake up with the knowledge, no, the feeling, that whatever you do, it’s a day well-spent purely because of the company you’re in, it obliterates all sense of genuine motivation.
At first, this puzzled me, but it makes perfect sense. I’ve spent all my adult life running and writing because they make me feel good. Running gives me endorphins and serotonin while writing flushes me with dopamine. They’re my drugs of choice and I’ll be an addict until my dying days. However, for those two months, I found a new habit — I got totally hooked on oxytocin. I usually get my oxytocin hit from El, but with all these new friends, I started massively fucking up my dose. I was getting a month’s supply every day and, like a pothead hitting his first crack pipe, I never looked back.
It was only about six weeks in — when the group started to break apart — that I realised the fluctuations in my mood. I was receiving less oxytocin without supplementing it with my usual supply of the other ‘happy chemicals’. Almost immediately, I began running again. Within a couple of days, I found myself jotting in my notes. Within a week, I’d begun the draft for my next novel.
And just like that, I felt inspired again. It’s not that I didn’t feel any inspiration in my heady oxytocin binge, but I didn’t feel the motivation to act on the inspiration, so it slipped through my hands like a wet fish. I know that all creative people understand this intuitively. It’s like a language that only makes sense if you recite it every day. Before too long, creativity is Sakhalin or Kuril Ainu. Dead and forgotten. You wake up and you do things and you go to sleep, but you forget to create. I’m fearful of this existence, and only now, with some distance from this dearth of words, I understand how vital it is to keep writing and making sense of the world through my monologue at the wall. Without it, I’m just a skin-filled sack of shit.
My lack of writing has not come at the expense of my reading, however. Plenty of Bukowski and Murakami means that you can expect a world of mysterious women and beer-stained poetry littering my Substack in the coming weeks.
I’d thank you for your patience, but I know I slip from your mind like ants in the sink as soon as you’re finished with these ramblings. So, instead, I’ll make my reintroduction with a virtual Sri Lankan nod.
