I’ve found a way to live with the anxiety of creative emptiness. That doesn’t mean I’ve made peace with it, but I have found a way to stop seeing it as an enemy. These days, I worry less about not having ideas and more about not knowing where to look for where they’re hiding.

It wasn’t an epiphany, but rather a series of tiny gestures: a Sant Jordi book fair, Fulgencio Pimentel’s website, a purchase confirmation email. Albert gave me a copy of The Physics of Sorrow, by Georgi Gospodinov — a gift driven more by intuition than certainty. Maybe it was the title, maybe the exquisite edition, maybe the synopsis, maybe a mix of everything. It doesn’t really matter — the magic of unnoticed gestures is that they don’t know what they might unleash.

From that book, I took an image that, over time, shifted from metaphor to method. A mother abandons her infant son in a mill. And all the lives that could have come from that child wait in anticipation behind a fence, watching for a single gesture: to see whether the mother turns back or not. Whether she returns for him — or disappears, taking with her every possibility of existence.

That passage gave me a new way of looking at the creative process —especially the conceptual phase: not as a desperate search, but as a kind of play. I imagine ideas as those possible futures, quiet, hidden behind a fence, enduring time, watching to see if I choose to look their way.

Since then, I no longer panic when I can’t find a concept. I try to approach it like someone exploring unknown territory, where nothing is guaranteed but everything is latent. And when I find nothing, I try not to punish myself by thinking inspiration has abandoned me. I trust I simply haven’t made the right gesture yet for something to appear.

This shift hasn’t made me more prolific. It’s only made me enjoy more the moment when I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Some days, everything stays quiet, like ideas are testing me. Other days, they appear unannounced, undeserved. But there’s always this new awareness: that creating isn’t about inventing, but about being available. Because, like that mother, maybe I too am being watched by ideas from some unfamiliar place inside my own mind.

All of this might sound like an overly roundabout way to dress up creative block. But it works for me. Creating, in the end, is this: taking steps toward an unknown future, trusting that maybe something wonderful is holding its breath on the other side of the fence.

A hug from H6,
Ingrid