Creative Energy

When I was a kid, I had an active imagination.

I had several worlds and ideas that I understood to the point that I was able to make many things with them. I know I had tried to make "books" when I was very young. I can only remember one, though. It was mainly a picture book. Scratch that, it was more like a comic book. A comic where each page is a panel, with a lot of empty space except for when text was there, and even then, it wasn't enough to fill it up because I hated writing with pencil. This specific book I'm remembering is one where I had my first original characters. Spoiler alert, they were all blue animals. Man, I truly was creative, wasn't I?

Blue Cat was first, obviously. They were my second-in-command, so to speak, for my imaginary world. Blue Dog was next, who was a snarky sonuvabitch. Excluding Blue Cat (who lives on in one, technically two characters), Blue Dog was the one I dropped use of last, but I think that was mainly due to the Webkinz plush I got of a saint bernard. He kinda inhabited many of his traits. The personality traits, Little Barker the Saint Bernard wasn't blue like Blue Dog was. Then there were Blue Bird, Blue Turtle, and Blue Fish. I can't tell you much about them, they're barely characters at this point. Hell, they were barely characters back then, when I made them. I just needed blue everything.

I don't remember whatever the hell the story was with them, but I know I made it.

After a while, I made a whole imaginary land of my own, named after myself. I always imagined it being accessible through the window in my room way back in the Old House. Immediately entering will net you in a small little village where all the houses were underground, and were accessible through either a hill with a door, or a trapdoor. If you had just entered this Burrow Villa, to the left is a pathetic excuse for a Hedge Maze. It has a bunch of winding paths everywhere, and it's easy to get lost... on either side of it. The hedge maze actually has a big-ass path cutting right through everything, making the actual maze parts worthless. Exiting the other side, you will enter The City, which is supposed to be a bustling city. This being me, someone who lives in the South in the USA, who hasn't really stayed long in an actual urban environment, I just imagine all the buildings being rather fluctuating in size and shape, most of them with no real usage other than being there to fill out the place. Maybe, just maybe, there was a water fountain in a town square there. If you continue past it, you will encounter a rocky, barren land that will eventually and suddenly stop. This, for some reason, I considered a "mountain," despite being more of a cliff. Mount Cliff is a sheer drop off that goes down a loooooooooooooooooooooong way, and also has a hole with a staircase reaching all the way down settled back from the cliff. Reaching the bottom, you will find a vast and empty desert, which at some point abruptly changes into a snowy field, full of the same emptiness.

That is the entirety of the land of which I can remember. It makes a half-assed amount of a lick of sense. No, that previous sentence wasn't a mistake, I'm making a point by having it be overly convoluted.

Regardless, I somehow made that setting. Me, with my imagination, as a kid.

I had also made book games as a kid, and somehow knew all the rules for everything. No, I didn't actually make a ruleset for everything, I just made shit up, but in a way that was either consistent or made things thrilling. Hell, the random shit that happened to me, good or bad, I just suddenly decided that it was going to happen, whether I like it or not. I had it play out like I was actually playing a game, because that's what every game I've ever played likes doing to me. Some of these games also had unique ideas, story, and worlds, so to speak. I didn't have to worry about where things came from, because as a kid, things just were. There were always cars, tools, random items that I used to represent the different minerals, etc.

Things just were. Things were just. Everything was, and I just accepted it as a kid.

Now, as an adult, I want there to be purpose in things, purpose that sometimes I don't need to put in.

I want to make stories, I want to make them in various media, I want to make art, music, videos, animations, shows, comics, games, you name it. But now, these days, sometimes I feel like I lost the unique skill I had as a kid. While I may joke about it, I don't think it was my imagination, as I can get quite creative.

I think I might be missing a random element to everything. I think I'm missing a part of me that had no restrictions to impede on my creativity. Because I had gained a bit more knowledge on the world, now I'm trying to put limits on the ways some of these ideas can work, and that might be a bad thing?

I still struggle with figuring out what it might be. It makes me furious and depressed, the fact that I struggle to make a creative story. It could be that I don't want to spoil myself on my own stories' twists and turns and what-not. I don't know. I see all of these ideas that other people have, and I wish that I can do the same as them. Rain World has an intricate lore that helps one understand the world that once was, who's ruins you are now struggling to survive in. Dwarf Fortress has a very deep world generation, and also generates a history that happens. Don't Starve has the Constant, a dark world that relies on a host to help change it, for better or worse, all the while the shadows' power grows... Binding of Isaac takes place within the demented view of Isaac's life, as he goes further into madness trying to escape his crazed mother from flat-out sacrificing him. Hell, even Terraria, with its Anachronism Stew of a world, still has a lore about every dryad but one dying to destroy Cthulhu, with it somehow surviving albeit damaged as the Moon Lord. There's even a cult that's trying to bring it back, something that you can actively encounter in-game.

I want to be that kind of creative again. I just don't know how. I really don't know what I lost when I became an adult, hell, even when I became a teen, I lost it. I want to make something, and not abandon it because I overthink about it.

I want to make things again.