Lately, it’s been hard to be creative.

Not because I’ve run out of ideas. Not because I don’t want to write. But because creativity asks for a kind of openness and mental wandering that feels almost impossible when the world feels overwhelming, unstable, and demanding constant attention. The mere act of living is exhausting.

I’m promoting my first book. I’m writing my second. I’m working as a marketing consultant and taking on additional part-time marketing work where I can. I show up professionally as if everything is business as usual. On paper, it all looks fine. Deadlines are met. Work gets done.

But in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, I doomscroll through news websites and social media. I can’t help it. My mind is churning. What can I believe? What’s fact? What’s fiction? What’s AI or bots?

It’s clear that our news sources and social media channels are being manipulated—I’ve experienced it myself. Accounts I don’t follow suddenly appear. Accounts I did follow are missing. Simple Google searches that should yield results are eerily empty. I can’t help but wonder what’s being censored, and why. To get a broader perspective, I regularly turn to the BBC News website.

Each morning, I walk to the desk in my home office and put on my professional face. I sip my coffee and start my day. I talk strategy. I make plans. I act like everything is A-OK, not because it is, but because this is what survival looks like right now in America.

For hours, I’m usually able to block out the outside world. I stay away from the news as much as I can, ignoring the dozens of notifications lighting up my phone so I don’t get mentally derailed down a rabbit hole of madness.

At the end of the day, I log off and slump into the sofa, and the doomscrolling starts all over again. What did I miss today? How can it keep getting worse?

My mind keeps circling back to the same place: the chaos of the world, the headlines, the stakes, the sense that things are not okay, even when we’re all expected to act like they are.

Writing requires immersion, imagination, and emotional range. It requires the ability to step into another world. But it’s hard to leave this one… a reality that already feels like fiction itself.

We don’t talk enough about how much emotional labor it takes to live our lives right now. About the exhaustion of being professionally composed while privately unsettled. About how “acting normal” can quietly drain our energy. What even is normal anymore?

Writing has always been, for me, a way of witnessing, of slowing things down long enough to say: this mattered. This is how it felt to live through this. That instinct hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s louder now.

But translating those feelings into creative momentum in 2025–26 is very hard. My previous book carried political undertones because it reflected the moment it was written in—the summer of 2023—with its post-pandemic undercurrents and a Jan. 6 insurrectionist as the antagonist. That felt necessary then and it was relatable for many readers.

What we’re living through now feels different. Watching democratic norms erode in real time—often driven by the very institutions meant to protect them—is not something I can write about as it’s happening. It’s too close. It’s too real. And, truthfully, we don’t yet know how this is going to play out.

I don’t have a tidy lesson here. I have honesty.

It’s hard to be creative when reality keeps demanding vigilance. When your mind keeps scanning for danger, injustice, or the next breaking story.

If you’re struggling right now, I don’t think it means you’ve lost your spark. We’re all learning how to move forward without the comfort of the old normal. I still have hope and it doesn’t mean pretending things are okay. It means believing our lives, our voices, and our stories still matter.