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Cristina Crescenzo (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

This article is about how I feel about certain moments in my life that have hindered my creativity and how I can start to open myself up to different types of inspiration.

There is this age old saying in the writing community that advises us “to write what we know” and for the past 22 years of my life I have followed that advice blindly to the point where it has become sort of a golden rule for me when I am attempting to start a new piece but unfortunately it is also the reason why I feel so limited in my creativity. Although, I believe there is nothing wrong with pulling inspiration from your own life, I think if you do it too much it can become redundant and this is a word not often associated with creativity. Thus, I have learned that this particular well can run dry if you are constantly reimagining your own stories because you are only relaying your own particular experiences. By doing that you can isolate your readers when actually all I ever wanted to do as an author was to put myself into someone else’s shoes by using my imagination so I can see how they live and as a result expand my empathy. 

Looking back on all my previous work I notice that the moments I most often pull inspiration from are the tragic ones. I feel that writing is a therapeutic way to sort through all of the difficult emotions that come from harsh experiences so my pain has been at the epicenter of all my creative writing since the beginning. It has gotten to the point where I can’t even recall many happy times in my life because I never took the time to appreciate them and write them down on the page. It is clear to me when you are bombarded with too much trauma all at once it can become ingrained in your brain and taint your outlook. Life can be hard in that sense but I also know that sadness isn’t the only emotion we are able to feel. It wasn’t until someone brought to my attention that all my writing is rooted in devastation that I realized I had built a wall around my heart and shut myself off from any positivity. 

Many great writers in the history of time have sought enlightenment in the darkness and created many poignant masterpieces. Those like Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allan Poe for example. And as such I tried to emulate them because I had felt a kinship with their stories. I thought that the saddest people made the best authors because they were able to bring out so many big emotions from their readers but I know now that writing from a happy perspective can also make just as big of an impact and it’s the type of thing we need more of in this chaotic world. Therefore, my familiarity with suffering does not make me a good writer and yet I have allowed it to become an integral part of who I am and how I see things. I can no longer allow that to be the case because our existence on this planet is a very long time so I must embrace every aspect of it and all the feelings that are threaded into each second including joy. It may be an emotion that I have lost connection with but I will reunite with it again and when I do my walls will come crashing down and my creativity will flow freely and endlessly. 

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My name is Cristina Crescenzo and I am an aspiring writer learning from my experiences and writing about them through this blog where I have been able to think about a variety of topics. My greatest hope is to break the stigma against mental health and raise awareness for the disabled community.