A letter to my genius

 

I was in my English class today and the teacher showed to the class a video of a conference Elizabeth Gilbert gave a few years ago. She is a very well-known American author and also happens to be the author of one of my favorite books. It was a twenty-minute conference where she talked about creativity and the level of stress artists have to deal with when it comes to the public rejecting or accepting their work. In those twenty minutes she was able to completely capture my attention. She explains the fact of how in ancient times, the Greeks and the Romans, thought that artists were able to work thanks to some kind of daemon or a genius who lived in the walls of the room. She calls this an elusive creative genius. I understand this as an external force that suddenly visits us and helps us listen or see something that’s been on our mind for a while o simply giving us hints of something we can develop using our creativity.

In the present times, artist no longer have this external force, they are considered to be the only ones behind their work, and according to Gilbert, that’s just too much responsibility for one human being.  So, the past few weeks I’ve been attending this class of management skills, which is part of my MBA program I’m studying in Madrid, and I honestly never expected to like this class so much.  Sometimes I feel it’s like a therapy. It’s been helping me to reconnect with things I enjoyed doing and for some reason I stopped doing. Also I’ve discovered that I enjoy writing. I enjoy it so much that it scares me. I’ve never considered myself a writer. When I was a teenager I even tried to have diary but it never really worked out. I would write for a few days and then that diary just became one more notebook with too many blank pages. These past weeks, as part of my Management Skills class, I’ve been writing weekly journals and as a strange thing, I do like to write these journals. As a matter of fact, I’ve been considering to start a blog or something. I don’t even know if someone’s going to read my blog but in the end, I guess, all that matters is that I’m been able to express ideas and all kind of feelings while I’m typing. It feels good. I’ve been trying to write something, anything. I opened up a file I had of something I started writing weeks ago so I could start my blog and I was completely blocked. Erasing and typing sentences trying to make them sound coherent but it was impossible. Completely impossible. I closed my laptop and decided to go out for a walk and find something. Maybe my genius was out there on the streets.

That little bastard was out there on the street, I found him. The moment I felt that bastard walking next to me I took my phone and took notes of everything, every nonsense came to my mind. Every single thought crossing mind went directly to my notes app. I was a few blocks away from home and I started talking to him like if it was a friend walking right next to me. “Don´t you dare to leave me right now, I need to go home and you are coming with me”, and so we did. Here we are, working together on this piece of paper that I now considered a mere proof that elusive creative geniuses do exist. I found mine today. I’m finding it hard to describe how it felt just to let this current of words to jump out of my head.  I felt so good. Now that I believe in you my genius, please, my dear creative elusive genius, you have my permission to go away for a while, but the next time we see each other, you better bring me some new things to write about.