When Your Muse Has Gone Missing
By: Sonya Matejko
Tags: Writing Life, Writers Block, Writers On Writing, Writing, Muse

I’ve looked in the closet of my childhood bedroom and the pockets of my worn-down jeans. I’ve searched in the sky at the edge of the sunset and in the summer storm that raged outside my window. I’ve scoured through books and in between the pages of unsaid conversations. I’ve turned over my morning rituals and my evening routines. I’ve even rummaged through seashells at the edge of the ocean and ridden my bike into the woods of my youth. And yet, somehow, I can’t find my muse.

I’ve gone hunting for the inspiration that used to live at the fringes of my soul and would burst with words that wouldn’t let me breathe until they were out. I’ve turned over my heart to see if I could find her. She used to soothe my heavy chest by releasing the weight onto the page. She used to bridge the gap between uncertainty and hope and the space between pain and healing. She was my confidant, my friend, and I thought that we would be in this thing called life together until the end.

And yet. I feel as if she has deserted me and gone somewhere without me. She has left me to the depths of my unknowing and to the anxiety that coils against my lungs. I used to wake up with her soothing whisper in my ear until words on blank pages would naturally appear. Now I wake up worried about everything, and my language seems lost or incomplete. It’s as if every time I try to write, I am building a 500-piece puzzle with half of the pieces missing. I feel insufficient, deficient, and wanting.

I am frustrated and voiceless without the drive that once lined my heart with fire and without the inspiration that filled my mind with imagery and soliloquies until it all poured out into stories that knew no boundaries or poetry that helped me sleep soundly. I am pent up and much too full of anecdotes that don’t connect. I am bloated with words I cannot express, and I feel as if both my intelligence and my creativity have been put to the test. And in this dense space, I somehow cannot let myself rest.

I must keep looking, I tell myself. Maybe she is at the bottom of the page if I rant for long enough. Perhaps she is hiding at the bottom of a glass of wine that’ll ease my troubled mind (but just one, of course). Maybe I need to try harder, to be better, and to reach higher into my consciousness. Perhaps if I run a little faster and try to live my life a little fuller, then she will appear along with my highest self. Maybe she is just testing me to look for her more creatively.

Or maybe there’s a different story to tell. Maybe my muse has a narrative of her own. Perhaps she became tired of me. She could’ve gotten sick of me always having these big, big dreams but never chasing them consistently. Maybe she felt exhausted from inspiring someone who procrastinated so hard on delivering. Perhaps she felt fatigued of always running after a person who couldn’t stop to see the page she was living in before writing the next chapter she wanted to be in.

Maybe my muse has been trying to tell me something for far too long, but I refused to listen. Perhaps I only heard what I wanted to hear, and then I closed the book when it felt like too much or when I was too close to the thing I had always wanted. I was always a sentence away, and then I’d rip off the page. Or I’d put stories on a bookshelf after only getting through halfway. Maybe she felt unseen, unheard, and even unwanted. Perhaps it was me who left her and not the other way around.

Maybe it’s time that I stopped the search. After all, they say the things that truly belong to you always return. So, perhaps, I focus more on making sure I am someone worth returning to. Maybe I slow down enough to add life between the sentences I speak and pause as much as I breathe. Maybe I hug myself before I sleep to remind myself that it’s okay to sometimes feel incomplete. Perhaps I inspire myself with a smile in the mirror instead of rushing out of the door. Maybe I become more by trying less.

Maybe I take it one day and one word at a time. And maybe I use this opportunity to surrender to the absence of my muse and explore what’s left behind, explore what’s inside.