Missing

cre-a-tiv-i-ty: (noun) the state or quality of being creative; the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.

I don't know where mine went.

I want to write and I want to be a writer, but I don't write which makes it very hard for me to become a writer. Which is why I at least want to write more here, because it's putting words down somewhere. I once read some sage advice: Write one story every day. At the end of the year, you will have 365 stories. They won't all be good, but they won't all be bad. It saddens me that I can't remember the writer who so wisely stated this.

But why have I lost my creativity? Where did it go? Okay, so I was never churning out literary masterpieces to steady international praise, but I used to have notebooks filled with story outlines, or opening paragraphs or at least really bad poetry. (Note: all my poetry is really bad, even when I desperately try to be poetic.) I've just gotten so....lazy lately. So excuse-filled. So lethargic. So unmotivated. So uncreative. Sigh.

Of course, all this is coming on the heels of the recent birthday and birthday-fueled introspection. I've actually discovered something that saddens me a bit: I don't really have a passion. I am passionate, as anyone on the receiving end of one of my rants could tell you, but I don't have something to be consistently passionate about. Some people might say, "But Jen, what about hockey? Isn't that your passion?" Alas, no. I enjoy it, I really do, but I'm not drawn to watch every game that's on TV, or to make regular journeys to the Hockey Hall of Fame, or stock my shelves with encyclopedic tomes on the sport.

When I think about some people in my life and their passions, I get just a little envious, mostly because they have found something they love SO MUCH they want to know more and create more and pursue more...it is truly awesome. And I want to find that.

Something I do love - really, truly, honestly, deeply, completely love - is words. Individually, in sentences, in paragraphs, in books, on signs, in a menu, in a crossword puzzle, anywhere. I just love them. I guess that's why I pursued publishing as a career option (yet I wound up first in production, then in printing; how very odd) and now feel I should be writing more, because that is what you do with words. But I can't write because I seem to have lost my creativity. So now what?

Sigh. Perhaps I should just pick up the pen, open the notebook and see what happens...