Inspiration Obstacles

5 min readJan 8, 2022

Ladies and Gentlemen, Whales and Snails, Lobsters and Crabs, Crayfish and Crawlers: I have something of a reputation for keeping going in the face of difficulty. I am a self-proclaimed shark and I swim ever forward. I hold space for people who once stood where I stand and need me to keep going as a sort of beacon. That is a responsibility I take very seriously and I hold that beacon high, my squids and octopi. But I have to confess to you that my arm has gotten very tired of holding that beacon up and I’ve been falling down on the job a lot this last year.

When the pandemic hit, I knew exactly what to do. I went into creative overdrive and I made something happen. I’m good in a crisis. I get creative in a crisis. I started my theatre company in a crisis. I recorded a bunch of albums in a crisis. My band’s album came out the day after a crisis, so really still in crisis. Last year, I made an audio drama in a crisis.

But I gotta tell you, my crisis muscles are exhausted. This crisis has gone on too long and for the bulk of 2021, I went to the inspiration well every day and if I came back with an eyedropper’s worth of inspiration, I counted myself lucky. I don’t got it, my oysters. I don’t got it. I don’t got it and I don’t know how to get it back.

I read a thing on Facebook that I haven’t been able to find again because I didn’t interact with it because I was mad at how exactly the algorithm knew where I was and I didn’t want it to know it was right. It was a thing about grief and how things can start to seem flat and pointless and it’s hard to get excited about anything so one should just follow anything with any hint of a spark whatsoever. And I wish this were just true from the last few months after my brother’s death but I think I was grieving even before I was grieving. My city (not to mention my field) has been gutted by the pandemic. Small businesses and even slightly bigger corporate ones have all disappeared. The map of the places I used to go is now a map of what used to be there. The world has narrowed so painfully and as winter hits it narrows even more. One of my favorite activities used to be turning up in a neighborhood and wandering around until I found a coffee shop to go write in. I can’t do that anymore. It’s not just that most of my favorites have closed; it’s also that I might never find one with conditions that feel safe to write in. 2021 has almost been worse than 2020 because things seem like they’re a little normal but are really still not and very few are acknowledging what has come before even as they catapult into a faltering future. Anyway — all that to say that I think I was grieving even before I was actually grieving.

Folks keep asking me what I’m working on and I don’t have a good answer. That (possible) new audio drama I’ve been writing during my writing practice this last year might turn out to be something but I’m not, like, any more confident in it than I am in the cup of coffee I make every day. I think Season Two of The Dragoning — which I wrote in 2020 — is pretty good but fundraising for Season One was so harrowing — I had not been able to imagine going through that process again until just a couple of weeks ago. Honestly, one of the things that got me over the hump was somebody on Reddit asking the podcast group at what point they thought a podcast that they listened to was dead. (We’re “ not dead yet!”)

To get something to production, I have to believe in something so hard that I will fight through the agony of fundraising and organizing to get there. I have to be buoyed up by my own faith and hope and inspiration to put myself through it and I haven’t had access to that in a long time. I suspect that it’s probably since I put out Season One without paying myself. It seems like it might be important to find the money to do that — as it has held up quite a lot, just energetically, just, inspiration wise. Which, let’s face it, is pretty much my only currency. Sometimes you have to pay one currency with another. But this is not my only block.

There are a lot of things that can block inspiration. It is a little like a body of water, in that inspiration’s natural inclination is to flow. The bigger the body of water, the more difficult it is to dam. But when you’re getting by with a tiny stream, a couple of fallen trees can jam up the whole works. Sometimes it seems like the logs are the block and then you realize there’s a boulder further downstream or maybe some beavers have gotten busy with some reeds.

The only thing for it is to set about removing whatever obstacles you can find — whether they’re the real stoppage or not. However you can get the flow going, even if it’s only a trickle, is good.

This post, I think, might be one of those logs in my inspiration stream. I started it at least a month ago. I wasn’t going to publish it. I just felt like I had enough of these “struggling with inspiration” posts this year. But then I came up dry for future blogs. “Why do I have nothing.” I wondered. And I thought — hey maybe it’s that post about inspiration that’s clogging up the pipeline. Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. All I can do is clear the pipeline. Or the stream. Or whichever water metaphor is right for this situation. And then hope the water starts flowing again soon. I know this is my dry season generally but that doesn’t make it all that much easier to be thirsty.