Autumn is the best of seasons, I thought while lying down on the sofa. It’s my own therapy couch, where I relax to analyze my mind. But instead of someone else peeking into my brain, it’s an alter ego who’s warm, happy and enjoys stuffing sunlight into his skin.
“But how does that make you feel?”, I asked. “I don’t know”, I answered. “I guess that I don’t wanna leave this space for a while”. And that’s what I needed, in fact. Most creative ideas come uninvited, granted, but you have to chew over a lot of unrelated thoughts first, or so works for me. I strangely started writing better fiction (or having more well-rounded ideas) after I made the decision to follow a strict sleep routine, for both waking up and before bed. “Dude, but that doesn’t make any sense”, says psychologist me.
So, the logic is that sleep needs you off the screens, and also that I used to waste lots of mornings because bed was comfy and the outside world was way too cold for me to get out. The brain being the spoiled child that it is, I chose to reward getting up early with a cup of tea and some music, which invited reflection. No cell phones allowed other than as music players.
“You’re still not making any sense”. Alright, I’m getting there. Turns out that the first thoughts are quite boring, but that’s the objective - as time passes, you gotta do something to escape boredom, and you either submerge in nothingness or start noticing stuff around you, or wondering your memories, or remembering random stuff from the day before. These are all excellent seeds for creativity. And doing this, yearning for a little bit of silent warmth, gives me great joy, directly and mentally as well. “That makes sense. Finally”.
You the reader don’t get to see that yet, except on these experimental short-form thingies that I’m publishing now, since I have so many ideas now that longer stories will take a while. But it’s still kinda cool, and I feel like I’m writing to myself anyway, so it works for everyone involved, i.e. me. “You’re back to square one now”, I say. “And what’s that?” “Crazy”. That was not so psycholog-ey of psychologist me, I say to myself. Go away now, you’re disturbing my self-analysis.