Dear creative writer me, where did you go?

Writing has been one of my biggest interests ever since I was a child. I wrote my first story when I was seven, and the passion never stopped since then.

During my childhood and adolescence, I have basically written only fiction, whereas now I am more drawn towards writing blog posts and listicles.

While that's completely fine, the dream of writing and publishing fiction pieces is still there. Getting that spark of creativity while writing fiction is a feeling that I miss and somewhat grieve at times.

The last time I had such a feeling, I was seventeen. Now, I'm almost twenty-four and afraid that I might never get it again.

Blogging is also something I am grateful to be into: it helped me monetize my content, be more consistent, and earning confidence in showing my writing to the world, something that my teenager self could only dream of. However, there is still this question lingering in my mind:

Where did you go?

Really, I cannot come up with a clue about how or why I became completely incapable of even conceptualizing a fiction piece.

Well, actually, I might have some answers. When I hit eighteen, my last year of high school has been terrible on my mental health. The immense pressure to perform well on our finals led me to neglecting my hobbies and warped my entire idea of rest into a loss of time. Any time I would take some time off studying, I would blame it if I did not perform at the top on my tests. Moreover, I experienced anxiety-like symptoms that made me extremely self-aware and led me to cut off almost all the people in my life.

My mental health got better after my finals, but I feel like I have not completely assessed all the damage it had on me, aside from the most evident aspects. Some of it is likely related to my loss of drive and creativity for fiction writing.

The pandemic has probably warped my creative mind as well. When thinking about myself before and after the pandemic, I notice many differences, mostly related to how I am being perceived and how driven I am. As a whole, my entire drive faded considerably during the pandemic. I do have recovered pieces of me that had got lost, but nothing has been done for my inspiration to write fiction and I have to admit that I also find myself looking for other missing pieces.

What I actually fail to understand is how I can revive that spark of creativity. I have tried the methods I used before - listening to new music, watching movies, animes and TV series, reading novels, Pinterest - but nothing has been working yet.

I have found apps like Milanote and World Anvil to create moodboards and timelines for stories, but unfortunately they can only do so much and I tend to forget about them easily, since I do not have clear ideas at all.

My inconsistency as a writer also does not help: either I am obsessed with a story or I get bored about a couple of days into an idea. I am trying to fix this flaw of mine by publishing more on Vocal and, in the past, on Medium. However, I find this useful to be consistent with writing opinion pieces, not exactly with inspiration for fiction.

I would normally conclude the story with some sort of bottom line or things that I have learnt, but I am struggling to find one, to be honest.

Therefore, I am now asking you, fellow writers on Vocal: has such a thing ever occurred to you? How have you found your creativity again?

Seriously, I'm out of ideas and I would really appreciate some feedback on this issue. So, if you will, write your solutions in the comments!