When you feel the energy of words rumbling through the page, vibrating through the tiny lights of your monitor— are you moved? Are you motivated to rise above your limitations? Can you pull the sledgehammer from the back of your head and smash the invisible obstacles in your way?

Or… are you crazy for even entertaining such a ridiculous premise?

I’ve reached a mental boiling point around every new year for the past 12 years, because I am reminded that I am a year older and not proportionally successful to that change in time. This year is no different. Such a realization frustrates me because I am always trying for this not to be the case, and yet it always is.

The harsh truth that I am constantly trying to deny the near-impossible odds of my dreams coming true. My attempts to find a level of financial and personal success through creativity is a fool’s dream, one in which I am doomed to repeat the same mistakes of millions of fools before me.

I spent a few months last year toying with the concept of ‘creative psychosis’. I was attempting to tap into a concept masquerading as an explanation. I wanted to know why I am inclined to explore many facets of creative mediums, be it writing, fine art or music. I can get lost in each, and they all bring me joy in their exploration. Thus, it seemed positively psychotic to attempt to juggle all of these things at once, and yet it made perfect sense to me— because it gave me great pride to work towards being multitalented.

But I’ve come to learn that this is not true creative psychosis. No, if the term is to be applied in a layman’s sense, creative psychosis is a person’s delusion that creativity is a career path for more than 2% of the population. Creative psychotics are driven by the freedom and natural high that imagination gives the mind. But to apply those freedoms to the captial-driven work world are a lost cause. Let me illustrate why.

I’m willing to bet that no one has ever written a story about a hybrid-cross between a rhinocerous and a giraffe who is constantly on fire but is never consumed by the flames. The reason for this is because the rhinoraffe has the magical ability to vomit whole air conditioners into the windows of apartment high-rises. With every vomited A/C unit, the burning rhinoraffe experiences a little less pain from the flames. So he wanders the country in search of places to throw up, with the hopes of one day extinguishing his eternal flames.

NOW… on one hand, this could be an almost unique storyline. Conversely, it probably led every person who read it to say, “What the fuck?” This, albeit it a rough example, proves my point that while creativity can be utilized to a high degree, it has to be tightly focused to ever have a chance for success in the real world. I could send the rhinoraffe storyline to every literary agent in the world, and the only ones who would reply are the ones asking me to pay them $200 to read my manuscript.

Therefore, such facts should negate my previous inclination— my desire to be multitalented. It is a dream that I should let die, because in the pursuit of trying to be good at many things, it has caused me to not be great in anything. If I just made a decision on one medium and studied it, researched it, pursued the craft and artistry of it like a madman bent on being the best, then I may just find some success in the real world. I may be a creative psychotic, but that doesn’t mean I have to neglect wisdom.

My failure to decide on one creative medium has turned out to be a slow suicide of sorts. These boiling points at each new year is of my own doing, because I am completely afraid of choosing the wrong medium and spending the rest of my life regretting it. Yes, regretting it in the exact same way I regret pursuing graphic design and production in a corporate structure. The irony is that design and production were originally meant to be my day job that got phased out as I found myself creatively at night. Now it is the only thing that I have that is resume worthy. You have to laugh sometimes at how life can throw shit back at you.

So will I ever choose a creative medium to solely focus on? I don’t know. At this stage, the only reminders I have are time and words on the page. If I don’t make up my mind soon, I can only hope that the future me reads these words again… and makes a choice for the future of him before he reaches a boiling point he can cool down from.