Last week I completed my self-evaluation for work. I read it again and again, uncomfortable with it, because writing self-evaluations is difficult for anyone whose instincts are more self-effacing. I awoke at three-something in the morning the following day, stiff with anxiety about what I had written. It read like the journal entry of a struggling hack grappling with emotional, intellectual and creative insecurities through the fog of her narcissism. It did not read like a professional person cooly evaluating her strengths and weaknesses, her accomplishments and her shortcomings in the course of executing her work. I could see my boss rolling his eyes as he read it.

But the thing is, what I wrote in that self-evaluation is all true and it comes down to this: My creative instincts and impulses have abandoned me. The endless shop of my imagination that used to provide me with all the goodies my writing and thinking required has shrunk to a measly, dusty storefront, sparsely populated with uselessness. Its main function now, apparently, is to feed my anxieties juicy scenarios of failure and heartbreak and sorrow. My self-evaluation was me trying to explain that regrettable fact and how I am aware it’s affected my work; me trying to acknowledge the creative blockage and frustration I’ve been feeling so keenly, and trying to articulate ways I hope to fix it.

In other words: I know I’m flailing. I’m trying to fix it. Please, give me time.

I quit my last job because there was hardly any opportunity for creative thinking, for coming up with big conceptual ideas about how to communicate a product, good or service to a specific audience. This job I have now, which I started last March, is the opposite. Every week there’s a new brief, a new need for big ideas, campaign platforms, new unusual tactics. At first I was able to bite into it; I dusted off my thinking cap, galvanized by the bright intelligence of my coworkers, my desire to match their ringing, smart contributions with my own, driven by my constant yearning to be the good student, the reliable collaborator. I felt like I was among my people again, like I had come back to myself a little.

My own writing has been falling off for a long time already. I have watched it crumble, like a boatful of scientists watching another glacier disintegrate into the ocean—helpless to do anything to stop it; knowing too well what it portends. If I so much as open the file on one of my novel or story manuscripts, I’m not met with a sense of urgency or curiosity to proceed with writing, creating, editing, revising, etc. I’m buckled with certainty about how awful it is, how it is doomed to fail. I can peck away at a few pages, uselessly, then I close my laptop guiltily.

Now, that creative decay has seeped into my professional work, the job that I like and that supports me, which is problematic and stressful in entirely new ways that perpetuate the stasis I find myself in. I’ve been struggling. I sit down to think about the briefs I get and my mind is full of irrelevance and misdirection. I can’t focus. I can’t pluck useful bits from the disjointed dull thoughts that are floating around. Anything I do latch onto quickly sours when any executional pressure is applied to it. The partners I work with have been doing more and more of the heavy lift of ideating while I try to make up for my shortcomings on the other end, writing more headlines than are needed, coming up with beautiful manifestos about the idea, articulating, managing, evolving and organizing the work as it moves through its various stages. Helping junior teams move their projects along. All of it to try to prove my value despite my creative dereliction.

The worst of it though is that I feel like I’ve lost touch with the most essential aspect of myself. The part of me I could always rely on: the ability to escape into a world of my own making, to discover the characters who populated it, to follow a twisting path through the details of their desires and needs, their peccadilloes and their triggers, their abilities and their obstacles that always led to a story. Writing was my answer to everything. Then I was lucky enough to parlay this part of myself into a job—a real job that pays me well in return for what my imagination and intelligence can contribute. I’d longed for a creative life, and here it is, everything I could hope for, and I’m failing at it.

I know I’ve written about this exact pathos before. It’s not a new complaint for me. I feel it more and more urgently these past months, the dusty shelves of my formerly populated mind under the light of these going-on-three pandemic years. I’ve lost the path.

But, as I wrote in my self-evaluation: I’m working on getting it back. I have a plan. I have ideas about how I can help myself. How I can be a better creative person, a more curious, more disciplined writer. All of it to say to my boss, to anyone who’ll listen, and to myself above all, please, don’t give up on me.