Inspiration Doesn’t Find You
You have to go find it
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Depression can be crippling, sometimes to the point where you start to question the point of life. It robs you of your happiness, your purpose, and your creativity. You have to find a way out of it and back to a life of joy-filled purpose, but how? I had to answer this same question.
A year ago, I was in a dark, dank cellar of self-pity. I had just undergone a major life event that left me alone and confused. I must admit that there was a certain comfort in that misery. The stress of navigating divorce left me tired in every sense. True to my instincts, I turned to the craft of writing to attempt to drain the poison from my soul and find perspective. A funny thing happened: nothing.
For the first time in my life, I had no words. I tried to extort them from my soul by force, not realizing that there simply weren’t any to extract. I thought that the pain of my life would flow from my fingertips and onto the computer screen like molten lava from an angry volcano. This seems silly now in hindsight, but I thought that locking myself away to write would free me from the loneliness in my soul. It simply didn’t work. I reached a place of discouragement before too long, and I decided to quit. I knew that life would go on, but my time as a writer was over. Once I stopped writing, I started living again.
God sent the perfect person to me at the perfect time to teach me a perfect lesson about life. I learned that life is not merely a state of existing, performing functions, and achieving results. Rather, it is a beautiful process of discovery — of experiences that stretch the boundaries of who we are, how we think, and what we have to say. Sitting in my living room, marinating in my own misery, and praying through my self-imposed void of existence yielded no results; it was time to try something new.
