It is now day two of my 30 days of blogging commitment. I am now experiencing the same problem I have had whenever I try to start a challenge, I have nothing to guide me. In my past experiences, using guides and planning what I wanted to do did help. Recent world and life events, unfortunately, often lead to my demotivation and abandonment of interests. I am too stressed to think of what to create organically. I just can’t think or describe what I want to say at times so I shut down and become miserable. A counter to this would be to find prompts.
Prompts have helped me in the past. They provided the structure that I tend to avoid, but depression makes following them much harder. I know using prompts would help me get back into art and make this writing challenge easier, but I am unable to find prompts that speak to me.
In acknowledging this obstacle, perhaps I should try to look for prompts that speak to my interest. Easy enough, but what happens when my interests keep changing due to boredom and always being anxious due to introversion.
How to find writing prompts
If I’m going to commit to this habit, I need to find prompts that will keep me interested. The first thing I have decided to do is to perform a web search for writing/blogging prompts. Here I ran into my first issue. Most blogs assume that the writer wants to sell something. Since I am averse to the discipline of selling of any sort, these prompts wouldn’t work for me. In refining my search I decided to search for creative writing and reflective prompts in my next searches.
Why Creative and Reflective writing prompts?
I chose these to look for prompts focusing on creativity and reflection. First, in choosing creative writing prompts, I hope to regain my ability to imagine worlds I would like to live within. In order to create, one needs to be able to imagine and dream of possibilities that others would not think about. I haven’t been able to do so. Since my father died a year ago, I haven’t really had any will or inspiration to create. My dad was the reason I wanted to try and created something. With his passing, nothing has really inspired me to create. I know I’m still grieving his loss, it’s why I wrote, in a fit of depression, that I was giving up on trying to create art for the near future.
If I really stop and think about it, I don’t want to give up or abandon art. I’d just be slowly killing myself by becoming complacent and useful in a world I neither want nor can, truly belong to. I can’t continue this microsuicide of numbing myself to life by consuming media or weed. It’ll be four years since I had made my youtube channel and I don’t want to throw it away because it’s painful. I used to escape from the drudgery of life by being imaginative and I’d very much like to regain that ability as I prepare to age into this life alone. I’ve already determined I don’t want a family or career, I just want to be happy. Art has been the only thing that has made me happy. I don’t want to succumb to the misery of complacency anymore.
Second, with regards to the above, the reflection would be my preferred method of getting people to know me. I am Black, male and introverted. Society needs to see me as a non-Human in order to function. Why would I want to participate in that indignity? There is something really fucked about people who can’t function unless there is a designated other. It just so happens that I will always be the other. I don’t get to be ‘normal’ because it means being white or white adjacent. I’m not willing to reinforce this shitty system. I no longer want to support a system that assumes lesser of me. It’s humiliating and saps any potential I might be willing to put foward.
I don’t want to interact with a world that assumes the worst about me so that others can project their own insecurities onto my false inferiority. I can’t be the punching bag for others’ existential dread. If I had to deal with it in isolation, reflection and rage, then so should the people who project their fear of death onto me. People are shitty because they are aware that they will one day die. They are angry that they are aware of it. And those who cannot accept this reality often make it other people’s problems.
Normal is for psychopaths, and that’s something I don’t want to be. It’s an evolutionary defect that has long needed to face extinction. And that’s all I’m going to say on that matter, for now. In using self-reflecting writing prompts, I hope to keep my sanity. Writing these posts is helping for now. I just need to stay consistent.
So what now?
I’ve bookmarked the prompts I want to use. There are about four hundred of them, so that’s plenty to start a baseline. It will be a slow start, but better to try and fail than to never try at all.
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