Ants. Coming & Going

Periodically, I try to give my brain a rest from everything business-related.

It’s impossible.

I send a weekly newsletter about writing, creativity, and making space between who we are and who we tell ourselves we are. This week was about the noise in our head that’s got something to say no matter what direction we go, and the ants ready to follow us there.

I rail against a voice in my head that says I’m lazy when I do that, when I turn my attention away from work for a second. More specifically, it yells that what I’m actually doing is a distraction away from some vaguely identified, more important thing.  Then, I feel guilty; I failed a contest I didn’t know I entered. This piles on a heaviness that makes it a challenge to do even a little of the thing I told myself I was supposed to do. Which brings more guilt. More lethargy. The voices take advantage of my weakness; they say I’ll never do anything, and run over me like ants. I don’t like the ants, and then I start wondering if my motivation comes less from ambition and more from ant-avoidance. This is neither empowering nor sustainable, and might explain why my brain feels like static a lot of the time. Like a TV screen. Covered in crawling ants. 

I spend a lot of time starting and stopping myself from obsessing about my work. I am always working, one way or another, gathering things to turn into posts, or prompts, or stories, or newsletters, or programs, or something, and the noise in my head has a lot to say about it. 

One way I capture ideas while writing is to take pictures of anything that comes up. Then I add it to many, many other pictures of ideas.  But then those become overwhelming and unwieldy, all those idea pictures.  Then the noise starts whispering that now the free-form creativity I’ve squished into a box and labeled “stuff that might turn into other stuff” is ruined. Is that writing any good now that the unstructured joy has been structured? Meh.

To combat that, I push myself back to the creative *but now, the noise coughs into its hand, doesn’t that seem silly and frivolous?* writing I was doing in the first place. I read books and I make art because it keeps my writing interesting *quite an ego for someone with four followers on threads* and then I notice I’m listening to a podcast about marketing, not painting or drawing and I think maybe the noise is right, I’ve leaned too far into business, my creativity is gone, and everything seems weird and pointless and suddenly the ants are upon me again. *there you go. give up. take a nap.*

The noise, the dull sense that I am at once doing too much and not enough, is always with me. Too light, too evocative, is it grounded, now it’s boring, too much work, not enough productivity, no free time, hit the deadline - the noise always has an ant-covered opinion. Perhaps it is the curse of the hustle culture, the organized-challenged, the short-attention-spanned, but it’s there. And so is my struggle for balance, orientation, identity, and self-esteem. 

This particular version of my noise distracted me. It made me think running in certain directions could placate it.  But nothing makes it happy. It’s noise, not a kid asking for ice cream. That’s me. Get me the ice cream. This is a battle for my precious and finite energy raging behind my chest cavity. I am the only one who decides who wins, who goes to the ants. 

Writing gives you a little step back, and you should take that step. Because otherwise, you might listen to it. You might believe it. You might not see that the only true thing this noise revealed about itself is that it’s an energy suck and a creativity killer. And not one other thing.

Get the ice cream, write above the noise, and keep out the ants.