Clenched fist

Sometimes I wonder if I just walked away from everything if that would solve my creative hold up. Sometimes I wonder if I started smoking weed more if it would help me get out of my own way. I am my own worst critic. I never re-open any document I've ever written for fear that I will look back on it and think it's absolute trash. I passed along all my essays to other people to browse over when I was in school. It's like I am embarrassed at my own attempts to be creative. I feel like my writing is worthless. I knew my essays and research papers were because they were always thrown together last minute. My other interests are more rewarding when I reach a goal. If I draw something or someone, I will immediately know if it is going well. Even as I write all this, I know there is something deeper.

I have been stuck in this condo for about five years now. I met with a realtor today who is trying to help me stay updated on the market. Right now most of the condos in my area are foreclosing and going back on the market, bank-owned, for about $100,000. I owe $121,000. Needless to say there isn't anything I can do right now but be patient. My best option is to hire a property manager and move out. The problem there is, I can't quite rent this place out for my entire mortgage ($946/mo + $160/mo home owner's assurance fees). That's $1,100 I owe a month and chances are I won't be able to rent it for much more than $850. I'd still have to pay about $250 out of my own pocket, on top of whatever rent I will have. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth taking the 'leap of faith,' so to speak, of moving on a whim just to experience something else.

I'm afraid if I don't do it now, I never will. I get anxious whenever I think about my creative rut. I've had this problem all year. I used to write all the time in my teens. I used to draw all the time with ease. Now nothing. Everything is forced except when I am drawing to impress someone at work or writing to update my blog. I feel like I have to have an audience for everything; some immediate gratification for whatever creative work I put out. I'm not entirely sure I can fix that addiction.

My bi-weekly, sometimes monthly visits to my grandmother's makes me always feel more depressed about my rut. The moment I step onto her porch and ring her busted doorbell I feel it. She lets me in, as she always does, with a happy greeting and then it starts to creep in. My mind wraps itself around her barred windows. Security measures my grandfather took to protect themselves in their constantly changing neighborhood. Her rusted brown hair shows signs of aging, stray bangs float in the afternoon light like cobwebs, perhaps an external reflection of a fading memory and a tired spirit. The thought of my dead father and my dead grandfather still haunt me whenever she goes quiet. Is she thinking about them? As I sit in her kitchen, I can't help but wonder if this is where all Hildreth men go to die. The only one who didn't pass away in this place was my grandfather's father, but I found his obituary the other day. He died at 41. My grandfather passed at 64. My dad passed at 49. These things dwell on my mind passing through the sewers of depression in my brain. Fuck. I can't break it.

I stare with angst now at my grandmother. I grow irritated of her same old stories. The ones she told me the two weeks or a month prior. I want to yell at her to get the hell out of her asylum. "Come out to lunch with me grandmother," I've begged. Secretly I worry inside my heart that she isn't capable of being in public anymore. Maybe she'll have trouble using the restroom, or she will fall, or she might embarrass herself somehow. I can't get her to remove herself from her own quiet, depressing life locked away in her home of 40 years.

I can't get out of my head that I don't follow the same path. Everyone is different. I'm not like the men who passed before me. I can break their record of failed attempts at creative success. I just don't know if I can do this here, in Colorado. I don't know if I can do it in this damned condo. I know I certainly can't do it with the help of anyone else. I've learned that several times over in relationships. I have to do this on my own.