The Rest Cure for the Modern Creative

I’m going to be so straightforward with you - I have NOT wanted to write.

For weeks now, I’ve felt like a ghost inside my own craft. Everything I used to love feels oddly distant - like I’m watching it through glass. The words that once came rushing out of me now sit heavy and stubborn in my throat next to my equally stubborn cold. It’s not that I don’t have thoughts - God knows I do - it’s that they all blur together. No spark. No pulse. Just echoes of things I’ve already said.

Lately, I’ve been moving through a season of major change mentally, academically, and socially. It’s all positive, it really is. I can feel myself maturing, growing into someone steadier and softer. But with that growth came a strange silence. For the first time in a long time, I’m not heartbroken or chaotic or chasing something impossible, and maybe that’s why I’ve felt so uninspired. Peace is beautiful, but it’s quiet. And sometimes, the quiet makes it hard to create.

But here’s the strange thing about losing your creative pulse: when you sit in silence long enough, you start to hear the truth.

Being brutally uninspired has left me inspired - inspired to write about what happens when you stop trying to perform for the world, and finally sit still long enough to meet yourself again. Because inspiration was never meant to be a spectacle. It’s supposed to be a heartbeat.

And I only learned that after losing mine.

The Performance of Presence

The world as we know it is obsessed with romanticizing everything - but only if it’s documented.

A sunset isn’t beautiful unless it fits the feed’s color palette.
A breakup isn’t devastating until it’s turned into a revenge thirst trap. (guilty)
A healing era doesn’t count unless you post the journal, the walk, the matcha! (hello performative males)

We’ve started performing our presence. It’s like we’re all scared that if something beautiful happens and we don’t capture it, it’s not real.

It’s almost as if we owe the internet proof that we’re living.

And I’ll be honest - I’m not above it. I’m just as guilty. I’ve stood in the middle of a moment that felt holy, thinking, “This would look incredible on camera.” I’ve felt the urge to make sure people know I’m at peace, or happy, or creative, even when sometimes I am barely holding it together. But lately, I’ve realized something darker hiding beneath it all: maybe we don’t even know how to feel things unless they’re filtered through a screen first. Maybe the world doesn’t feel real anymore, and we’ve all learned to live in a simulation.

Being My Own Personal Fly on The Wall

I was fourteen years old the first time I felt myself disappear.

I remember walking into the bathroom one morning, looking in the mirror, and feeling like I was watching my life happen from outside my body. I blinked, moved my hands, touched the glass, and nothing helped. I was there, but not there. That became my normal for a long time.

Wake up.
Take a deep breath.
Pray I’d feel real today.
Brush my teeth.
Look in the mirror.
Dissociate.

My mom and I spent years trying to find the name for it. We spiraled through online psychiatric pages, went to different therapy offices, and had one too many late-night Google searches, but nothing quite captured it.

For years, I thought I’d ruined my brain from a bad high school weed experience. It wasn’t until later, after therapy and research and a lot of self-reflection, that I realized it wasn’t just the weed - it was the screen too.

The Screen That Shattered Reality

It sounds dramatic, but stay with me. We talked about this in “Chained to the Rhythm" 

Think about what happens when you open TikTok.

You scroll once and there’s a perfectly edited clip of your favorite actor. Favorited. Scroll again, and suddenly you’re comparing yourself to a filtered 23-year-old influencer preaching self-love from a million-dollar apartment. And it’s an ad for BetterHelp. So you scroll again. Now you’re crying over a celebrity death you didn’t even know happened until you rolled past an extremely insensitive meme. And the cycle goes on and on. 

You’ve cycled through fifty emotional realities in under ten minutes.

That kind of rapid-fire consumption does something to your brain. You’re not meant to feel that much that fast. It’s emotional whiplash disguised as entertainment. After months of this during the COVID lockdowns, I started to feel permanently detached from reality. My brain couldn’t regulate anymore -  I was overstimulated, under-inspired, and emotionally short-circuited. That’s when I realized: maybe the death of authenticity didn’t start with filters or fame - maybe it started with overexposure. We’ve seen too much, felt too much, absorbed too much. And now, everything real feels foreign.

When Creativity Becomes Survival

Dissociation taught me something I didn’t know I needed to learn: how to rest. Before all this, I was the kind of person who ran in constant motion. Every minute needed meaning, every day needed proof I was progressing. Productivity was my drug. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t create. I couldn’t focus. I could barely exist.

So I had no choice but to stop.

I used to think rest was laziness. Now I see it’s rebellion, especially in a world that’s addicted to performance. The truth is, you can’t create from chaos. Inspiration can’t survive in overstimulation. And dissociation - as terrifying as it was - forced me into stillness. It stripped me of every distraction and left me with nothing but my own mind. At first, that was hell. But eventually, it became home.

Because when you finally stop doing, you remember what it feels like to be.

You Need to Calm Down… Like Seriously

We live in a culture that glorifies the grind. The constant on switch. The idea that your worth is tied to your output. But how can you meet new people, chase new dreams, or find new inspiration if you never let yourself pause? There’s beauty in the boring days. Healing in the quiet ones. The truth is, you can’t romanticize your life if you’re not actually living it. I had to be forced into rest to realize that. When I was at my worst, I wasn’t daydreaming about success at all. I was begging for peace. I didn’t want to create something viral or profound. I just wanted to feel alive.

And ironically, it was in that emptiness that I started to come back to life. Rest isn’t glamorous. It’s not aesthetically pleasing. It’s slow and uncomfortable and often looks like nothing. But it’s the only place inspiration is born. Because when you’re truly still, you finally make space for wonder again.

Rediscovering Realness

Now, when I create -  whether it’s writing, photography, or even a fleeting thought in my Notes app - I try to come from stillness, not noise. I ask myself: Do I actually feel this, or am I just trying to prove that I do?

There’s a big difference between sharing and performing, between documenting and living.

I’ve learned that real inspiration isn’t glamorous, it’s gritty. It’s not the “perfect morning routine” kind of beauty; it’s the kind that happens when your brain is tired, your room is messy, and you somehow write something honest anyway.

Authenticity doesn’t sparkle. It breathes.

And that’s what I want to protect - the kind of creativity that feels alive, not algorithmically correct.

Maybe Inspiration Isn’t Dead. Maybe We Are Just Tired.

I used to think my dissociation killed my creativity. Now I think it saved it.

It taught me that inspiration doesn’t come from constant input, but it comes from stillness, from the space between overstimulation and silence.

Maybe inspiration isn’t gone. Maybe we just stopped listening.

Maybe we buried it under content calendars, social media goals, and highlight reels. Maybe it’s been waiting quietly for us to log off and come home.

Because when you finally sit with yourself with no noise, no audience, no performance, you realize something:

You were never uninspired.
You were just exhausted.

In a world that’s always watching, the bravest thing you can do is go still.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the real art isn’t about creating something new. Maybe it’s about remembering what it feels like to be human again.