For the first time in months, something that I kind of dreaded before coming here finally happened. That is not having the motivation to write an article. It’s not so much that I don’t have ideas of what I can write about, as I have a list with a few ideas that I collected over the past few months, with some ideas of articles that I could write. However, for the first time in months, not one of these ideas spoke to my mind enough to push me to actively start writing about them. That being said, writing articles is something that I really enjoy doing. So now that I finally pushed myself to start writing something, I would like to reflect on the different possible reasons behind this writer’s block. 

Apart from the changing weather, which quite honestly doesn’t bother me that much, the main difference with the previous months is the absence of a random “revelation”, whether it was some niche linguistic topic or just some other niche topic that would suddenly interest me. In the past months I also was inspired by some personal reflections influenced by some existential crisis, which also fueled my creativity for writing articles. 

In my opinion, the main reason behind my inspiration deficiency is somewhat a consequence of the intense summer, during which many volunteers arrived and went away. While there were a lot of people, now that everything is kinda empty it feels like something is missing. Moreover, all the people that were here before I arrived are now gone, which still feels quite strange. It’s not about the new responsibility that I feel like I now have, as this is part of the job. I don’t even know how to describe the feeling properly. It’s a bit as if I lost some point of reference, in some ways friends that I could look up to. I remember during my first few months here I would count the time that I’ve been here by counting how much time I have left with them here. To some extent I had already prepared myself to have a weird summer. 

Usually, especially when you’re still in school, summer holidays are a fun time you’re waiting for the whole year. For me, I knew that this summer would be the time in which I would see my friends progressively leave Skopje, the office and thus the flat. So while I was looking forward to it, I was also apprehensive about this period, as I knew it meant that not only my friends would leave soon, but also that I had myself a limited time left here. 

Coming back to my lack of motivation, inspiration, or even creativity I suppose my main obstacle is that as you’ve probably noticed I may have started to think too much. But not quite exactly thinking too much about my tasks and whatnot, no, simply overthinking for the purpose of overthinking. While self-reflections and introspections can have many benefits on your self-awareness, personal growth, emotional stability, etc. It can also have some drawbacks, in my case, it hinders my creativity as I’m creating mental blocks for myself, for no apparent reason. 

However there’s still hope. Because as you can see, I managed to write an article about my creative drought. So hopefully this article will help me regain the spark I had for writing niche articles, and will encourage myself to get outside of my head again. 

Chloe Gaschy