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I have been thinking about this for several days, but I am posting now in response to a recent entry by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_storyteller.
For most of my life, a big part of who I was was expressed in my stories. These stories were written most often in my secret code (if they were written down at all), and only in the past few years was a major one shared at all. It was also expressed in the detailed characters I created and played in SF and fantasy role-playing games during the last 13 or so years.
As I have indicated here before, these creative springs dried up over the past couple of years. I have felt lost, bereft, wounded, not-myself. Not just because my creativity was dear to me, but because I wrote myself in most of the stories (which was a big reason I never showed anyone). In these personal myths, I worked out who and what I wanted to be -- but it was always safely distant, at least one step removed from real life. Plausible deniability. Fantasy. Playgrounds in other space/times.
I begin to believe that one reason my creativity left me was that it was "time to put away childish things." Not that creativity is childish, but because I kept using it to distance myself from my own actual gifts and power. Without my stories to distract me from the shortfalls of my own life, without their comfort and entertainment, I was thrown back onto even deeper inner resources. When I found a blank space, I had do go deeper down and deeper in than ever before.
The result is that I have finally found those actual gifts, the true vocation, of which my stories were hints and shadows. When I go inside now, to the place where my stories used to well up, I don't see my avatars, I see myself, as myself. But more than I used to be. In this world, not a fantasy. I don't have to go looking for the lost piece of myself any more.
I hope that one day I will be able to write stories again, to game again. But in the meantime, I am concentrating on being the author of my authentic self, not my fantasies.
_storyteller.For most of my life, a big part of who I was was expressed in my stories. These stories were written most often in my secret code (if they were written down at all), and only in the past few years was a major one shared at all. It was also expressed in the detailed characters I created and played in SF and fantasy role-playing games during the last 13 or so years.
As I have indicated here before, these creative springs dried up over the past couple of years. I have felt lost, bereft, wounded, not-myself. Not just because my creativity was dear to me, but because I wrote myself in most of the stories (which was a big reason I never showed anyone). In these personal myths, I worked out who and what I wanted to be -- but it was always safely distant, at least one step removed from real life. Plausible deniability. Fantasy. Playgrounds in other space/times.
I begin to believe that one reason my creativity left me was that it was "time to put away childish things." Not that creativity is childish, but because I kept using it to distance myself from my own actual gifts and power. Without my stories to distract me from the shortfalls of my own life, without their comfort and entertainment, I was thrown back onto even deeper inner resources. When I found a blank space, I had do go deeper down and deeper in than ever before.
The result is that I have finally found those actual gifts, the true vocation, of which my stories were hints and shadows. When I go inside now, to the place where my stories used to well up, I don't see my avatars, I see myself, as myself. But more than I used to be. In this world, not a fantasy. I don't have to go looking for the lost piece of myself any more.
I hope that one day I will be able to write stories again, to game again. But in the meantime, I am concentrating on being the author of my authentic self, not my fantasies.
