How to regain your joy of creating
Normalizing living on the edge, rediscovering joy, and creating again
Hello all,
It has been months since I have disappeared from my social media platforms, including Substack. I had passed so many days, weeks, and months in the survivor mode, with the lack of acknowledging whether I am surviving or not. Physical and mental meltdowns walked me through those times. There have been many times I felt that I had reached my limits to continue. Yet, here I am trying to balance myself in every possible way, because this is not done yet. I have another battle to survive, a long one, that I need to accomplish. I just need a little bit of motivation.
I tried to survive those harsh days, hoping that bad days would pass eventually. Everything can pass. Documenting my journey is another way of tapping on my shoulder and saying to myself, “Good job on those days I survived.” April always gives me hope for this life. I am writing this letter in the first hours of April, with a scary thunderstorm outside. I am looking for more hope by reaching April, but first I need to close one tab in my head, which is using a significant amount of energy in the background for months.
I am trying to find a way to perform my responsibilities without having a life crisis. Maybe all I need is just a little flame of courage, a little bit of hope, and a great deal of questioning what I want from my new life. Even though every day, every little anxiety is kicking in, I need a structured life plan. Because endless to-do lists, delayed dreams, and an unknown future create another open tab in my head that drains my energy eventually. Everything is just sitting there where I randomly left it for months. Each with a pin I stuck on it. It's like those pins don't just stick where I left them. These scattered pins are also somewhere in my mind, like dozens of tabs opened, waiting to be looked at and processed one day. Everything is in a corner of my mind, but I don't know which corner.
I don’t know what my sentences are pictured in your head, but I feel an urge to write them down where I can share them. I am happy to see myself bringing two sentences together since December 2024. As I said, everything was so scattered, including my sentences.
I had a year where my great expectations turned into great worries, doubts, and fears. Losing all the motivation to continue led me to a place where I don't have even a single solid goal in terms of my career and life in general. It is kind of good to think about what I need to do, because for a while I wasn't thinking anything but just going with the flow in life.
For a while, all my reactions about my life started with ‘what a’.
What a year, after 2024.
What a new year, for New Year’s Eve.
What a month, after January.
What a week, after every single week of January.
What a day, after my last working day in Istanbul when I needed to commute from one end to the other end of Istanbul, which was my last full day in Istanbul before I moved.
What a night, after my night bus ride from Istanbul to Izmir with my family.
What a morning, after I waited in the park for the moving company’s truck in the city where I call my hometown yet I feel like a complete stranger.
Where I have been lately
I moved from Istanbul to Izmir at the end of January this year. Izmir is my hometown, but I have been living in Istanbul for the last 14 years. This makes me feel like I am a stranger in my hometown. After all, I spent almost all my twenties in Istanbul where I called this place my home for so long.
After moving from one city to another, I wasn't in control of my time for like a month. For a while, I felt like I was living in a life where I didn't even know which day it was. My life has changed tremendously. I am afraid to lose myself in the process, while I am trying to find myself at the same time. Through February, there were times I didn't realize which day it was, where I was at that moment, what kind of reality I was in. I experienced things that I had never experienced before during February. I joined an event for harvesting olives and spent almost three weeks on a mountain living in a cabin. It was good to spend some time with nature away from the screens and city chaos. Touching the olive trees and watching the sunsets over the mountains were priceless.
My obligations forced me to make this major life change and leave the life I am used to in this period of my life. I knew that city life was a trap, but you can feel it deeply when you take a solid step for a real change. In my opinion, one of the hardest things anyone can do is to escape from it after all those years. Even though you wish with your heart to go to a place where you can live in touch with nature, it is almost impossible to act on it because you are used to surviving in the city with all it brings. What I mean to say is that it needs courage. It needs a great deal of courage to make a new life for you away from the city. I am still surprised we managed to do that.
March has passed with settling in, getting used to the place I moved recently, and handling my PhD works.
I also want to talk about my last two months in Istanbul before I moved.
During December and January, I had the busiest time of my life. All my PhD work accelerated tremendously; it was hard to catch up with everything. Almost every weekday, I was going back and forth between two continents in Istanbul, changing unbelievable sets of transportation. It was hard to count, mostly. Beyond my commute, working in the lab up to late, going home for only sleeping several hours, and then hitting the road again in the morning felt like I was trapped in a cycle which was impossible to escape.
The second week of January, I was down with the flu that lasted for two weeks. I hadn't been that sick during any of my previous sicknesses. It was mostly because I was intensely working on my PhD experiments in the lab. My process was very intense, and I needed to commute between two different centers to perform my experiments. The time I spent in traffic was tremendous. The hardest thing, though, was that I had to work when I was sick, which made me even worse physically and mentally.
I normalized living on the edge in my life during my PhD. It is hard to survive each moment you have if you carry the burden of unfinished businesses, while you try to have a life you feel that you are living, not just existing.
For many reasons, it is getting harder for me to set new goals each year. I am in a phase where I am not completely sure what I want from my life specifically. That’s why I kind of allowed myself to go with the flow while I am observing myself and my life in this process.
How to regain your joy of creating
I feel that I lost the joy of creating art and everything around it. I allowed myself to feel what I felt, miss creating again, and find my purpose during these times. Also, I was obligated to put it aside while my life was mostly focused on surviving to stay stable physically and mentally.
I am trying new ways to get back to creating what I like. I want to find my joy for creating again.
I am exploring other people’s work as well as my previous works, which always help me to remember what I created, my process, my journey, and my passion. Also, I need to be braver about sharing what I created. After I moved from Istanbul, I stopped sharing my photography on Instagram as a street photographer. I have some doubts about my photography because I used to have a great source, which was Istanbul itself. Every day I could take photos I liked as a street photographer in Istanbul. I am trying to make my peace with what I can do right now in my new circumstances.
There are many photos I didn’t share anywhere yet. So, I will continue sharing them here on the series called “See What I See,” where I share my photography here, in Merging Creativity. You can check my previous post here.
Thank you very much if you read this post until this point. It might be a little bit pessimistic and confusing for you, but writing this helped me to close one tap in my brain. I am happy to say that I am back!
See you till the next time. Bye!
Merve
