Creative Block: An Endangered Imagination

I stumbled across some wonderfully amateur drawings from my childhood this past weekend, and I envy the conceptual capabilities of my 5 year old self. Fish could fly above the ocean surface. You could dance on the back of an elephant. You could run on a rainbow. I look at my curbed mind now and wonder how my imagination managed to flee from me.


Even though we go through life being told we need to step out the box and embrace the conceptual, I fear that we find ourselves more and more restricted. A grown-up’s creative “out the box” brief means “go wild, but make sure it’s the clients description of wild.” It means “think of the most ingenious idea possible, but we might have to cut some things that just aren’t in our budget.” It’s “Say something that will blow others’ minds, but you can only say it in 140 characters.” And if in the odd event you ever do get a limitless brief, you are stuck trolling the internet for inspiration and get deflated when you wish you could have thought of it first.


We find ideas in self-interpreted, non-sensical song lyrics, through others’ smart ideas on blogs, through stumbled photos on Flickr, through humorously relatable gifs. I am beginning to wonder if we didn’t have the magnitude of inspiration right at our typing fingertips, if we would even be able to abstractly visualize again. I long for the moment where a big idea springs solely from the corners of my very own mind, without stemming from a googled influence. Not a spark off someone else’s great train of thought. The more I see, the more I forget. The more I observe other’s experiences, the less time I have to gain my own experience. The more inspiration that floods through the crooks of my mind, the less limitless wonder I seem to be able to pull from it.


I want to be able to paint a picture for sheer thrill -a simple image ingrained in my imagination that has plagued me to come out. I don’t want to have to justify it with “grown-up” conceptual analysis. In some way, the steps I take forward open my mind to the unimaginable, but the sad thing then is that the unimaginable becomes what? Imaginable! It becomes “been-there-done-that”. It becomes “got-the-t-shirt”, “made-the-t-shirt” and “came-up-with-the-concept-for-the-t-shirt. “


I’m unsure how to settle the persistent niggling of creative frustration. I’m not sure if it stems from self-doubt or disillusion with the concept of growing up. However, to me, I find my imagination quite endangered. Or to put it simply, a bitter creative block has hit.