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The sun is starting to peek through the clouds in my mind.

I never considered myself an avid reader—well, not until recently.

The boundless realm of writing didn’t appeal to me before I began to transcribe thoughts of my own. Now, with the knowledge of the vast places a mind can take people, I’m never found without a book by my side. I suppose it helps that I now have the curious desire to be someone other than myself; to get away from whatever future I’m being led towards.

However, at times I find myself lacking the state of mind necessary to absorb the poetic significance of a book. I have to approach a visual world instead.

The world residing in novels and films has become my ticket out of the life I used to sleepwalk through, and I’ve realized that the more I evade my reality, the closer I’ve become to truly understanding what feeling I’m longing for.

I stand frozen, beyond the feeling of fascination that the realms, societies, and people I’ve spent my whole life observing and, in a way, living, developed from a seed in a mind not unlike mine. A seed tended to, cared for, and hoped in sprouted into a tree—a tree that keeps its leaves through the blistering, depressive months of winter. 

My mind, however, has no trees. The land is spattered with small shrubs and saplings that only just made it past the process of being solely an idea and large holes where a seed was unearthed and burned from the judgment of others before it started to become something valuable. Even the grass is beginning to curl and brown with the clouds that block the sun from shining hope onto a field desperate for something to cling to.

My ideas are blocked before they can begin, so with my hopeless creativity, I turn to someone else’s brilliant mind to keep me occupied. Their fictional universes appear to have skies a brighter shade of blue than I’ve ever seen and a sun that makes the darkest corners of the world radiate without embarrassment. These universes restore my faith in the direction society is headed in, even if it is imaginary.

I’m just beginning to learn that having a conceptual drought isn’t a unique experience. Everybody has dry spells where their ideas can’t grow, and dark clouds block the sun but don’t care to rain. 

But the grass isn’t always greener in someone else’s mind. Instead of occupying my time by daydreaming about how my thoughts and opinions could thrive in a place with richer soil and a healthier environment, I’m learning that my energy is much better spent on restoring what’s right in front of me: watering the few sprouts that have shot up over the years, supplementing them with the positive criticism of others, and preventing my shame and disapproval from devastating my growth and pushing me back to ground zero once again. 

Maybe, at some point, the effort I put into it can cultivate the land in my mind into something beautiful too.