If my dreams didn't suffer being strangled at birth and were actually able to keep their footing, they were cruelly run over by hit-and-run circumstances and people. Eventually, it was just easier on my delicate nervous system to let them be stillborn, or to abort them altogether...
A shrink once told me this was called "fear of success", but I don't think that's true in my case. I think it was a survival technique. The real problem was that all these unborn, stillborn, and murdered dreams took my creativity with it when they disappeared.
But over the past year I began to get my creativity back. It wasn't something that just happened though. I had to work damned hard for every atom of it. It still feels like I'm running on beach sand. I've gotten a lot accomplish this year, not in terms of completed projects or of ticking off a mental checklist, but in terms of personal progress as an artist. Opening up like that can be exhausting, especially when the doors and windows have been boarded up and their sills painted over a few hundred times. But I did it, or I should say, I'm doing it. It's a daily exercise; it doesn't come as naturally or as effortlessly as it used to when I was young and was full of piss and vinegar.
The ability to dream still sleeps in the womb waiting to be reborn. I'm feeling it stir though, getting itself into position to be delivered. My dreams aren't dead, nor have they grown old, they've merely been gestating. Sometimes all we can do is curl up in a foetal position and sing ourselves a song. This is mine:
