The Day I Stopped Chasing Inspiration

When we are children, we don’t even think about where inspiration comes from.

So why, when we grow up, do we often start chasing it, thinking it comes from the race?

Small children see beauty in everything around them.

Adults, on the other hand, are more focused on creating that beauty.

I think this is the main reason we forget, as we grow up, that inspiration isn’t something we have to chase.

It’s something that comes when we simply look at the world like children, noticing the beauty in everything around us.

Why do people now forget how beautiful the world simply is?

We spend hours on Pinterest trying to find inspiration through references.

We look at paintings, works of art, read discussions, watch videos and tutorials.

We forget that inspiration lives in every moment.

We just don’t see it when we’re rushing.

We only start noticing it when we slow down.

When I’m rested and calm, I can find inspiration simply by watching a ray of sunlight crawl across a wall, creating patterns.

I loved watching this as a child.

Or watching a fallen leaf dance across the surface of the water, making a perfect circle.

Or watching raindrops leave circles as they fall from the sky to the ground.

Our minds are constantly rushing somewhere, and somehow we convince ourselves that simple things like these aren’t enough for inspiration.

That in order to catch it, we need something more complicated. Something no one has ever seen or done before.

But actually, all we need is a rested mind and eyes that are wide open to the world, the way children’s eyes usually are.

We often think inspiration is something we have to catch.

We wait for the right mood.

The right idea.

The right feeling.

We think creativity will arrive like a visitor: suddenly, beautifully, and at exactly the right moment.

And when it doesn’t, we wonder what’s wrong with us.

I’ve had moments like that too.

Moments when, for one reason or another, I would get caught up in the race.

When I would temporarily forget who I really am.

People often accuse me of being childish.

I even look younger than my age.

But it’s not really about that.

It’s about the way I see the world.

I take things lightly.

Very often, I feel a little like Scarlett O’Hara.

I also like telling myself, I’ll think about it tomorrow.

I don’t like endlessly replaying sad thoughts in my head — not because I’m not serious, but because I don’t see the point in giving them my energy.

When something happens that upsets me, I simply go and create something beautiful.

I don’t have trouble letting go.

So I let go of my sadness quite easily.

And when I create something, I usually like the result so much that I forget about everything else.

When we don’t feel inspired, we can start looking for answers inside ourselves:

Maybe I wasn’t inspired enough.

Maybe I had lost my creativity.

Maybe I needed to consume more, read more, watch more, scroll more.

Maybe somewhere out there was the thing that would finally make me want to create again.

So we keep looking.

Until one day, we stop.

Not because we stop being creative.

Because we finally understand that inspiration doesn’t like being chased.

The more desperately we try to find it, the quieter it becomes.

When I stopped looking for it, something strange happened.

I started noticing things again.

They were simply all around me.

They seemed to be waiting for me to stop for a second and notice them.

Because inspiration doesn’t shout.

It’s very quiet.

It likes silence.

A sentence would appear in my head while I was making coffee.

A thought would come to me while walking through the park after the rain.

I love fresh air. It feels as though it clears my mind.

Something completely ordinary would suddenly connect to something I had been thinking about for days.

I would notice a tiny detail and think,

I want to write about this.

Not because I had forced myself to create.

Because I was actually living.

And maybe that’s the part we forget.

We try so hard to create that we stop experiencing the life we’re supposed to create from.

We sit in front of a blank page and demand an idea.

We open our notes and ask ourselves,

What should I post today?

We think about what will be interesting to someone else instead of what is interesting to us.

And that’s why we create without inspiration.

Because inspiration comes when we share something that is ours.

Something special.

Something that exists inside us and no one else in exactly the same way.

That’s what makes it valuable.

We search for inspiration as if it were hiding somewhere on the internet.

But sometimes inspiration isn’t waiting for us there.

Sometimes it’s waiting in the middle of our actual lives.

In a conversation.

In a walk.

In a ridiculous thought that makes us laugh.

In something that hurts.

In something that finally doesn’t hurt anymore.

In the moment when we realize we’ve changed.

There was a period when I was creating content for likes and didn’t even realize it.

I thought I simply loved figuring out psychological mechanisms.

I was on my twin flame journey, and I wanted to understand why everything worked the way it did.

I enjoyed explaining everything through visuals and humor.

For a while, I even genuinely enjoyed creating that content.

And I confused that enjoyment with inspiration.

Until the moment came when I realized I had nothing left to say.

Everything has a beginning and an end.

I had gone through every stage of my journey, from beginning to end.

There was simply nothing left for me to explain.

And that’s when I returned to ordinary life.

That’s when I remembered how interesting my life actually was — something I had completely forgotten.

When we create from our ordinary lives instead of from what we think people might like, we don’t have to force ourselves.

I used to think that discipline meant forcing myself to create even when I had nothing to say.

Now I think discipline can also mean knowing when to step away.

To live.

To observe.

To let your mind wander without immediately turning every thought into content.

Because creativity needs space.

And inspiration needs somewhere to land.

The funny thing is, the moment I stopped chasing inspiration, I didn’t become less productive.

Quite the opposite.

I started writing about everything.

I suddenly remembered my grandmother and how much I could tell about my childhood.

How warm those memories were.

How almost delicious they felt.

I could write about my childhood for hours.

And that was when I became more honest.

First of all, with myself.

I stopped creating because I was afraid of disappearing.

I stopped trying to prove that I was still interesting.

I stopped treating every quiet day as a creative emergency.

And I started creating from something much simpler:

I actually have something to say.

Maybe inspiration was never something I had to find.

Maybe it was something I kept interrupting.

It was there all along — underneath the noise, the pressure, the comparison, the endless search for the next idea.

It was there when I was living my life instead of constantly documenting it.

So now, when I don’t feel inspired, I don’t panic.

I don’t immediately open another app.

I don’t force a brilliant idea out of an exhausted brain.

Sometimes I just go live.

And somehow, sooner or later, life gives me something to write about.

Not because I caught inspiration.

Because I finally stopped chasing it.

There is a saying:

you don’t have to chase what is meant for you. It will find you when you’re ready.

For some reason, we usually think this is about people.

I think it goes much further than that.

We often try to be liked by everyone.

To please everyone.

We think that if we create something everyone likes, it will make us successful.

But the most memorable creators never created with the goal of being liked by everyone.

They were remembered precisely because they had something that was unmistakably their own.

The most distinctive work often creates the most debate — and sometimes the most hate.

When we try to please everyone, we slowly erase the very thing that makes our work valuable:

the fact that it is uniquely ours.

Inspiration doesn’t come when we ask ourselves what we should create to make everyone like us.

Things created from that place come from other people’s opinions, not from inspiration.

Inspiration comes in those quiet moments when we remember ourselves.

When we ask ourselves what we can create that will make the world recognize:

This is mine.

And when we become mature enough to listen to ourselves, it stays.

We just have to look at the sunlight crawling across the wall, creating patterns.

—

This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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