I realized my spark was gone on a random Wednesday, somewhere in between submitting an assignment and opening another internship rejection letter. It wasn’t until I was four hours on the road or boarding my flight that I put the pieces together. My brain wasn’t looking for inspiration—it was looking for quiet. There wasn’t a magical cure to my burdening emptiness and burnout, at least not one that I could find through endlessly scrolling through other people’s lives on social media. Traveling showed me something more honest: it showed me who I was outside of the pressure.
The one lovely thing about going somewhere where no one knows who you are is that you have quite literally nothing to prove. That’s exactly how I felt when my flight landed in Charleston, South Carolina. For the first time in months, I had nowhere I needed to be, nothing on my agenda, and not one assignment where I had to fake my own creativity with a loaded pile of BS.
In fact, creativity was shown to me through early morning walks where the sun had just started to paint the sky and the air was just crisp enough to leave my nose red. It was handed to me as a beautifully curated coffee as I chatted with the barista, which I would never have done at my local Dunkin’. I could hear it in between drinks as my friends and family would laugh between each sip, discussing what bar we would check out next because the night was still open for fun. It was everywhere, and I didn’t even have to fight through a bunch of noise in my head to find it.
I didn’t come back from Charleston with the motivation and creativity that could feed someone like Martin Scorsese, but what I did bring home was something softer and personal. I brought back the understanding that my spark was never gone, like I thought it was. It was simply tired and overworked—being asked to prove itself time after time just to meet a rubric and sometimes rejection. Away from all of the noise and pressure, creativity and inspiration embraced me, and not the other way around.
If you were to ask me what getting your spark back would look like, I would tell you that it’s not forcing it or trying to push through by pressuring yourself more, but instead waiting and letting it rest long enough for it to glow on its own.