Creative Energy

Day 54 – January 16, 2026

I think creativity might be coming back. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Not with a divine announcement and a suspiciously flattering spotlight. More like sparks. Small ones. Quick ones. But real. Enough to make me stop and pay attention.

Because this afternoon, for the first time in a while, I had the urge to write something that wasn’t about healing or trauma or survival or the strange humiliations of having a nervous system that sometimes behaves like it’s being haunted professionally.

I wanted to write because I wanted to write. Just that.

No blood in the sentence. No recovery arc. No obligation to drag meaning out of pain and hand it to the page like a polished little offering. Just a thought. A weird one. A curious one. One of those sharp little observations that lands in my brain sideways and immediately makes me want to chase it down the block.

That feeling has been missing.

Not gone, exactly. Just buried. Trauma is greedy. It consumes mental bandwidth like it pays rent there. It takes every room in the house and labels it urgent until the softer, weirder, more electric parts of you retreat into the walls and wait.

That is one of the cruelest things about surviving something violent. It doesn’t just hurt you. It interrupts your relationship with aliveness. It takes the playful parts hostage. It makes everything functional. And I can do functional. God knows I can do it beautifully. I can be elegant in a crisis. I can survive on grit, spite, and good vocabulary longer than most people would find medically advisable. But I do not want to live there forever.

I want the spark back. The unnecessary thought. The little jolt of interest. The part of me that makes things because she is charmed by the world, not just because she’s trying to survive it.

And today I felt that part stir.

It started small. A thought. An image. A line. Then another. Then that old intoxicating little current started moving. Curiosity into creativity, creativity into momentum, momentum into that almost erotic feeling of being mentally alive.

That’s the part no one talks about enough. How creative energy feels in the body.

How it sharpens everything. How it makes the air feel different. How it reminds you that your mind is not just a trauma archive or a risk assessment department. it is also a playground, a weapon, a garden, a strange beautiful room where meaning and mischief still know how to find each other.

That felt so good I almost got mad about it. Like, oh, so this is still in here? Interesting. Good to know I’m not just a beautifully dressed recovery program with opinions.

There is something incredibly intimate about feeling creativity return after a long stretch of emotional survival. It feels like a private hand on the shoulder. Like a version of myself I’ve missed leaning in close and saying, I’m still here babe. Let’s make something dangerous and gorgeous.

Roger spent most of the afternoon following me around like a furry shadow who could sense some kind of shift in the energy and decided I should not experience it alone. His creative contributions included emotional support, suspicious staring, and general disruption. All valid. All respected.

Tonight I’m noticing something I do not want to let slip past me. Life isn’t just returning. Parts of me are returning too. The strange parts. The bright parts. The observant little menace in me that still wants to turn the world over in her hands and see what falls out.

That matters. Actually, no, let me say it correctly. That thrills me.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And creativity, finally, waking up like she has somewhere to be and no intention of arriving quietly.