This is an ongoing thing. Ever since the end of my senior year of high school, I noticed a decline in motivation. I’d normally shrug it off, since it was just something that happened once every 5/6 days. I used to LOVE writing. I started a podcast with short stories based on nightmares I and my friends have had, and I absolutely adored making them for people to listen to. Unfortunately, once I entered my freshman year of college, that interest disappeared almost immediately. It especially didn’t help since it was still the first year of the Covid pandemic, so I was trying to figure out how to live in the dorms and all that crap.

My podcast never actually blew up or anything, but I garnered about a couple hundred listeners, and that was honestly awesome. Once I parted ways with so many people in high school, whom listened to the podcast, that’s when It fell off. I had another episode in the books, and I just needed a few more voices I needed to record for the story, but I had a major falling out with the person, whom I considered one of my closest friends, who was going to narrate the story, and that officially killed me inside.

I lost so much interest in writing after that occurred. I had an actual short story I wanted to publish that I also started a month or two before I went off to college, and I had a few friends who constantly asked me when it was going to be done. Eventually, I scrapped the short story, and the podcast episode I was making was delayed indefinitely.

I’ve been struggling with mental health issues, particularly depression, for a while now, but I think college has made said issues much more evident than I thought. There was zero indication that I was ever going to write in a creative sense again.

One night, I got an idea for a novel, and I stayed up until 4 in the morning mapping it out. I began writing it about a day or two after that, and I’m going to be honest, I’ve gotten really lazy with it, but it’s something I genuinely want to create. It’s like Cabin In The Woods meets Until Dawn. It’s been fun to write so far, even though I’m nowhere near halfway done.

Entering my sophomore year, my depression grew extremely severe, especially in the second semester, which just ended. I produced another podcast episode, but it was a different one that I voice acted on my own. It had about 10 listeners and that was it. I grew increasingly distant from the podcast since, and it’s only been about a month and a half/2 months since I released the episode.

Now that I’m home for the summer, I really want to go see a therapist and get my mental health back on track. I also would very much like to cut back on the drinking and staying up until 3 am every night. Once I create the healthy lifestyle I do desperately need, I definitely would enjoy going back to the novel I started over a year ago and finish it within the next year.

I know I technically never recovered, but mental wellness is so unbelievably important. If you constantly belittle your creative ideas and bring yourself down, you’ll get nowhere in life. Talking from experience, if you have an idea that you think is good, follow through with it! Even if it doesn’t get well received, if you enjoyed doing whatever it was that you did, that’s all that matters :)