I’ve read books about the muse. Steven Pressfield wrote a book called The War of Art. It’s over one hundred pages, and you can read it in a day. It fuels my inspiration, which is a subject of debate. Does the muse really exist, or is it some sort of construct we made up to procrastinate? I write every morning out of necessity, whether the muse wants to show up or not. It usually doesn’t because of its sensitivity. My stress chases it away. Only when there’s peace does the muse come, and even then it can fly away by the tug of the wind. Then I have to force words out that don’t match because I have to live with doubt inside.

Doubt and worry, those are two elements that defeat the muse. Do I believe in inspiration? Yes I do. I think it’s around. And people wait for it to come. But you can wait for years before it arrives. And it doesn’t stay. It’s here for a time that passes too quickly for even a thought to form.

I waited for inspiration to come when I was in my twenties, and I hardly ever wrote like I do now. Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art that resistance is the killer, and we all have to live with it. People resist the urge to create by taking drugs, drinking, partying, copulating, procrastinating, all because of fear. Fear is the basis of resistance. He says to fight it. Resistance is what we live with every day without fortune. I have to fight resistance that often. The blank page is a metaphor for thoughts that run away when we’re looking for content because we fear the content will be rejected, that people will berate us, or these days that people will expose us for something we created.

Social media excels as a tool for resistance. People are on it every day rather than getting work done. I browse it myself and recognize names of users who constantly write words that hurt other people. I see politicians on there who make lengthy statements defending themselves and their parties. And I see citizens castigating them rather than creating something of any merit. And those people are on it every day. It sickens me. It saddens me. We’re talking about tools for teenagers and young adults.

I remember Myspace way back when, over twenty years ago, was designed for young people to meet and hook up. That was what it was geared toward. And then older adults and professionals used platforms like Facebook and Twitter (or X) for marketing and voicing their political agendas, all when they could’ve spent their time creating something people could use instead. They wasted it on their hatred, which was really a reaction to their own fears.

Which brings me back to inspiration and how these people are waiting for it to strike. But they’re so inundated with fear that they constantly chase the muse away by wasting their time hurting other people. That’s most of us, while some of us choose to work every day despite our muse, despite our fears taking us over.