I lost my creativity.

A glimpse into my thoughts on originality and expectations.

In the current world everything is a mixup of media, conversations in which actual trends are talked about, topics that have been told with slight modifications and news that respond one to another; it’s like seeing a music sheet, where there is a main theme and it is repeated and modified through the whole song. The doubt is, when does the modification implicate originality and when is it a copy of a previous creation?

Being a students means, whether it is admitted or not, having free time at least in some specific periods of time, so the main advice for us is to be productive and try new things, and in my opinion this is useful… but also vague, which takes for granted other possible struggles.

Social life takes a big part of a human’s life, it is what shapes us and our future, as we have always heard “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”; so when you’re either a teenager or a college student it is crucial who do you choose to spend your time with.

This isn’t a big text about social relationships, but my point is that specifically when you’re around these ages, you learn to adapt, you start copying (mostly indirectly) the attitudes and reasons of those who are your closest and even if you don’t seem to notice, you encapsulate yourself too.

Do you personally know somone who decided to start a complicated project early in their lives? Something like starting a business goal or becoming a content creator? It is complicated to determine a common experience for every one of them but if we can say something that they usually share is that it was hard.

My point is that when all the people around you already have their vision of yourself it is hard to make ideas come to life, at least publically. I’m not going to give the usual “just do it” speech, even though I think that it is possible to make those ideas come to life if you put a great amount of passion and effort, what I mean is that when you are full of curiosity and love for knowledge while being "stuck" in the personality others have perceived as you, you start doubting whether you’re capable of the things you propose or not, and with that you start feeling insecure and you are the principal person that realizes it, but your creativity does it too.

I started posting on substack as a way of expressing what I think in different ways, from my thoughts to my passion and interest for personal unknown topics. However, there are some moments when it stops being my own safe space and starts being what it is known as a "side hustle", a product of the current obsesion with constant productivity and production; it becomes a checklist of things that I want to research but not for myself, instead I do it for converting it into a product that can be looked at.

That’s why I have never told anyone about my account and/or the little essays that I write, I have the constant fear that if somone else knows about it then it will stop being a safe space, and the pressure for it to become a productive machine will increase. The problem is that this decision comes with the unconscious thought that I’m not doing enough, that later in my life there won’t be enough time to try new things.

And so I take advantage of my "creativity", I write down all the ideas that cross my mind and start multiple essays, but they never leave my notebook or the computer, no matter the importance of the idea, I don’t gain the courage to fully develop it, I doubt it, I compare it and I leave it.

Then I see other videos, I contemplate when they talk about originality and I let it penetrate through my brain, over and over again until I realize it, but it seems impossible to break because it’s already become a cycle.

I realize now that it has turned into an unsettling feeling of doubt what I think of creativity, that depending on the moment I can include originality in its description or not, that maybe the ideas that I decide to write down count as an example of it and maybe I shouldn’t feel that doubt.

So the truth is that I do not know if I have lost my creativity or not, while I think that I am not as confident with myself as I would want to be, I also think that I’m not moving backwards. I do feel pressure everyday, not to write or to create ideas, those are my own choice, but from the thought of not doing enough and not producing what I could be doing knowing “all the time that I have”, but sometimes a step back is needed, sometimes you have to try to look at things with a different perspective.

The message is not that “if you want to do it, you can”, the message is that what I feel, and what I have observed other teenagers and college students feel too, is that the “not doing enough speech” and all the pressure is created halfly by ourselves, by absorving little comments made around us and amplifying them.

Therefore for this year my main advice is to stop caring and stop thinking about the little mean voice inside you, when the time reaches that you have created a new idea, don’t compare it to others and think that it isn’t as original as it has to be to succeed, don’t turn it into a checklist of things that you have to do in order to complete it, let it marinate, give it time to progress; it is important that you take action on your ideas but don’t make it rushed, no matter if it lasts a day, a week, a month or a year but give that time the liberation to use it to progress and expand on your ideas not to doubt it.

If you have reached this point of the article then I want to thank you for dedicating your time to read it, if you have any feedback on what I have written I invite you to comment and express yourself. I also invite you to subscribe if you have enjoyed it (which I hope you did), until the next one, have a nice day!

Sources of inspiration:

• 2026 creative impulsivity challenge: making art out of curiosity, not fear - A video by Anna Howard (Wild Geese) about creativity.

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