I am a creator. I pour my heart and soul into everything I make. Sometimes I love what I make, and others hate it. And sometimes, more often than not it seems, I despise what I make and others enjoy it.
But that's part of being a creator. But none of this is what prompted my mind to say,
"Hey make this."
No what prompted my mind was the realization that I had fallen into a trap. A trap that every creator will fall into at least once. Sometimes they manage to crawl out victorious after a long battle. Other times they fall in the war, only to rise up again like a phoenix from the fire. And other times they fall in battle to never rise again, the cold cruel world having beat them into submission and stolen the spark that made them unique.
I dubbed this trap society. Society is always trying to change people to fit their ideal images.It's just one of those unavoidable things about it, and they label everyone. The ones who conform are considered perfect and normal. Then there are those who conform, but really they are just sitting in wait, ready to break free and be themselves, sometimes they are called odd. The last group of people are the ones that are called outcast or weird.
I used to be in that last category, then I fell to the trap. I tried to conform to society's wishes and lost sight of why I created anything. I lost sight of why I wrote.
I write for fun, and my friends know this. I'll write most anything, no guarantee that it would be good. However, word spread that I liked to write. No longer was it my two best friends occasionally asking me to write a short story for them. Now it was strangers, people I didn't know or trust walking up and telling me not asking me to write for them.
At first I was fine with it, I had more prompts to work with. However, for some reason I was not having fun. I often thought,
"Why am I writing like my life depends on it when I hate everything I'm making?"
I brushed that off because I thought that it was something everyone had to do at some point.Like in school when your given an essay prompt you hate but have to make do with anyways. I thought of it as a kind of character building exercise that I despised. I was writing but I despised my work so much that eventually I stopped. It wasn't until nearly a year later I realized I had fallen into the trap.
I had fallen to the weight society placed on me. I became the go to person to write a story. I was known as the author who would write anything. I was no longer myself, I was no longer a creator. I was a robot, performing the task I was given. One set of instructions, one task. Once that was completed onto the next one. Never anytime for fun or games. Unfortunately my battery was running low and there was no place to recharge. All the signs were there, I was sluggish and slow.
It was around that time that I just stopped. It was a good thing I did, because if I had gone on anylonger doing what I had been my battery would have died. I would have lost one thing I had enjoyed, society would've won.
Nearly a year passed with me not writing anything outside of school essays. Slowly but surely over that year my battery recharged. I would see a pen and paper and think to myself about what I could make. I would think about the endless possibilities. At the end of the year my battery was fully recharged and I was ready to write again. Only there was one difference, I told no one I was writing.
Because while my battery was recharged, my memory reminded me of what happened the last time people knew I wrote. It was if I had reached into myself and rewrote my coding, but it was imperfectly done. Because before when I loved to show off what I had made, now I couldn't bring myself to.
That was almost a year ago, i've only just gotten to the point where I will begrudgingly show work to others. My coding screams at me to not show it, yet my mind says to do it.
I do what my mind says, only because I want to finish rewriting my coding. I want to be able to stop being the robot, and burn it to the ground. So I can become the Phoenix and rise from the ashes as a new person. Someone who is ready to fight, except this time hardened by battle. I want to raise my pen in the air and fight for those, who like me, have fallen. I want to give them the chance to burn the bad coding and shed the robotic ways, so that they too can fight by being themselves. I want to let those who have given up rise like the phoenixes they all are, and trash society's way of beating us down.
