22 and Jaded (like a bad rock song)I haven’t written creatively in almost two years. I knew it’d been awhile, but when I actually calculated it and the number was two years I was jarred and so seriously freaked out that I had goosebumps. At twenty years old, writing was so much a part of my identity. At twenty two I only write, grudgingly, to complete an academic task (or on this blog, usually to complain about some aspect of academia). I’ve spent the last five years filling my head with knowledge (sometimes. hopefully.). For what? I always thought I was going to university so that I could ply my brain with poetry and philosophy in order to achieve deeper levels of thinking, so that I could learn about the world, so that I could have life experiences, so that I could then write about it all. But that’s not really what has happened. I’ve become so ingrained in this academic culture that I now spend all my time preparing to live life, but not really living it, and not writing about living it either. I also don’t daydream like I used to. Daydreaming was a significant part of "being a writer," for me. It was also a big part of who I perceived myself to be. I used to spend so much time in my head, imagining and (jejunely)philosophizing. I still spend a fair amount of time there, of course, but now it’s more about fretting and mulling and going over and over things that have gone wrong, instead of breezily following tendrils of fantasy wherever my mind wanted to go. I think I've lost a lot of the clean, naive hope that fueled those dreams. I think that's part of the problem. Is this just about growing up and becoming an adult? Is my personality changing, growing away from the daydreaming/writing/fantastical Sam and into the more subdued, the more realistic and grounded Sam? Do most people abandon their creative aspirations for "the real world" when faced with adult concerns like rent and groceries and deadlines and jobs and The Future and finding someone to make babies with? I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write. And that’s terrifying too. I’ve lost the ability to slip seamlessly from a wish, into a daydream, then into a story. I've lost the knack for poetic syntax, for arranging words in pretty patterns that mean something. I want it all back. I want that me, that twenty-year-old me who knew what she wanted and what she was worth, back. But ... how? | 
