Grief and Creativity

My younger sister died last week. It was sudden and I’m still in shock and maybe I’ll write about that later, but right now I’m thinking a lot about grief and its effect on creativity. 

This has been a rough time for most people. The pandemic, an attempt to overthrow democracy, one of two major political parties getting hijacked by a cult of personality of the worst possible personality to form a cult from… it can be a hard time to create in. 

But for me writing is how I process things. Writing, or more specifically storytelling is all at once a means of escape, a path to understanding, and a way to feel accomplishment. Going through the grieving process I’ve been detached from that ability to process. At several points this week I’ve woken up at night and not been able to get back to sleep as my brain cycles through coming up with story premises and starts narrating the opening paragraphs before I tell it firmly to “shut up” before it starts the cycle anew. 

Today is the first day I have mostly to myself since my sister’s passing. I’d hoped to write some on the stories I’d been outlining before, and yet there’s still the grief and the feeling that the phone will ring with some new thing to take care of, and of course it’s always hard starting from cold on a story. Story telling momentum should really be its own blog post. So instead of working on writing a story, I’m writing this blog post, and in a moment I’m going to go sit down and look at the things that usually inspire me: a big pile of comics, game books, and I’ll put on some music. 

There will still be the sense of grief in the background,  as well as the disappointment that I haven’t created what I’d like, but I’ll feel like I’ve moved a step forward on both fronts.