vestigial organ
I’ve been suffering from an unnerving sensation of uselessness lately. I only go to work. I don’t produce anything meaningful. It doesn’t help that my job isn’t fulfilling, but I should be working on my own projects regardless. I use to write more, but the motivation has left me. There was a time when I was interested in a multitude of arts. I liked to draw. I liked digital art—fractals, 3D. Even photography, which I still do, doesn’t satisfy my need to contribute something to the human organism. I feel like an appendix dangling uselessly. I am the vestigial organ of the human race.
This is nothing new. My real concern doesn’t lie in my current function, but in the reason for my transformation. Why am I no longer driven to create? I used stay up late working on a project for no other reason than to finish it for my own satisfaction. Did I used to suffer from childish delusions that my art was valuable to society? Did I think it was only the progenitor to something greater down the line? I don’t remember. I like to think that I only did these things for their own sake, that I only drew to draw, not to impress anyone or improve any aspect of the world. I could be wrong.
I now find my life becoming a little hollow. I’m desperately hanging on to my creativity, but I think it’s slipping away. I fear becoming a gray soulless animal living only to survive and pass on genes. I hope that this is only temporary. But this hope might be part of my problem. I look to the future for comfort. I will resume my old preoccupations later, when whatever is wrong with me fixes itself. These thoughts might be delusions.
My mind has been stagnant for months and it’s unbelievably painful. My brain is so atrophied it hurts. Do all people experience this questioning of themselves? I am in my early twenties and I feel I am irreversibly becoming some person I never wanted to be. I hope that I can tap back into my younger, more creative and aspired self. It seems that this very action of writing is therapeutic, because I might be feeling the very thing that has been lacking these recent months. I hope that I’m on to something.
