Use It or Lose It
A note on passion, presence, and getting unstuck
Something I hear from people, whether they identify as creators or not, that their well has run dry. They feel passionless. Purposeless.
They tell me that they used to care deeply about something, but then lean in and almost in a whisper admit that whatever they used to feel has slipped away somewhere between responsibility and routine. A few describe it as a room they haven’t entered in years. Others say it feels more like exhaustion than sadness. They’re not blocked so much as scattered. Pulled in so many directions for too long. Everything is being asked of them at once. Nothing is asked of them deeply.
I’ve heard this from a woman who once wrote every morning before work, and now can’t remember where her journal is. From a man who built a business quickly from the ground up and woke up one day unable to feel proud of it. Lovers who simply do not feel loving any more, like the spark is gone. From people who did all the right things and still feel oddly untouched by their own lives. As though they’re riding passenger, watching life happen.
What they’re describing is not the absence of talent or commitment. It’s the cost of constant motion. The cost of abandoning things just before they ripen. The well didn’t run dry. It simply wasn’t allowed to deepen. And this makes sense of course.
One of the first things to go when we feel passionless or stuck is actually PASSION. I know. It sounds redundant. But think about it. It’s like we lose our appetite. The wanting thins out. The body stops leaning forward. Curiosity goes quiet. We begin to detach from anything that might make us restore our sense of aliveness, because, we don’t feel like it. And then we do something very modern and tragic. We wait. We wait to feel inspired before we move. We wait for certainty to return. We wait for the heat to come back on its own. Meanwhile the muscle atrophies. Passion, as it turns out, is not a mood that suddenly visits well mannered people. It’s a behavior. It’s something you practice into being. Doing things that make you feel passionate, bring passion. Not the other way around. Passion follows motion. It wakes up when it’s being used. More brings more. And less, brings less.
The question stops being “Why don’t I feel it?” and becomes “What am I refusing to touch?”
Because passion doesn’t disappear randomly. It recedes when we stop feeding it with friction, risk, novelty, and awkward reaching. We start anesthetizing ourselves with justifications. I’m tired. I’m busy. It’s not the season for it. All true. And all are totally beside the point. Aliveness is not a reward for having your life in order. It’s the consequence of engagement. I see this happen all the time. Just the other day, after weeks of not writing poetry, I decided I wanted to write. But nothing came, so I ignored the fragments circling my mind. Yesterday morning I picked up a pen and simply wrote. Out came a poem. That’s how it works. You pick up an instrument before you remember why you loved it. You walk even when the weather is mediocre. You write sentences that feel like you’re swimming through peanut butter. You flirt with your work. Poorly. Sincerely.
Passion is promiscuous that way. It responds to contact. Not ambivalence. It wants your fingerprints on it. It wants to be messy with you. If you starve it long enough, it won’t die. It comes out sideways. Irritation. Restlessness. Anxiety. Longing with no mailing address.
New Creators Podcast is out, and it’s on the incredible poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
His words have been a quiet apprenticeship in how to live, without anesthesia, without shortcuts. Rilke didn’t offer answers. He offered a way of standing inside uncertainty without rushing it into meaning. He taught us that terror belongs with beauty, that solitude is not a failure of love but its deepest responsibility, that creativity is not a hobby but a necessity rooted in the marrow.
This episode is an invitation to stop demanding clarity from life and start meeting it with courage. To live the questions. To let yourself be changed by what is larger than you. To trust that no feeling is final.
The cure is rarely dramatic. It’s embarrassingly small. A single step. Then another. Muscle memory teaching the body it’s still alive.
The map back to passion begins with remembering what makes you happy. Recall what makes you feel good. I don’t mean this in a nostalgic way or as a mood board. No, I mean it as a way of re-routing your sensations. The body remembers before the mind does. It remembers the weight of a book in your lap, or the tiredness in your forearms after an honest days work, the way time dilates when you were inside something and not analyzing yourself from the outside. Passion lives there. In the physicality of it. In doing, not deliberating or deciding or holding yourself at arms length. We get lost when we try to reason our way back into desire. You don’t need to feel convinced. You need to feel involved. Start where ever there’s a pulse, even if it’s faint. Touch the thing you’ve been circling. Stay with it long enough for your breathing to change. To become softer. More at ease. That’s usually the sign.
What I’m trying, rather timidly, isn’t to give you a solution or a prescription. Think of this as an invitation to stop outsourcing your aliveness to some future version of yourself who feels ready, who finally has the time, the energy, the permission, the motivation. That person is fiction. A mirage. Passion doesn’t respond to grand plans or perfect conditions. It responds to being taken seriously right now, in the middle of a life that’s already full and already messy. Don’t buy into the illusion that you need to overhaul everything or it all has to change. That’ll just keep you stuck. You just need to re-enter one room. Sit down. Touch what’s there. Let yourself be clumsy and awkward and unfinished.
The well deepens the moment you commit to staying with it.
Hey, if any of this speaks to you, I want you to know that February 12-15, I’m hosting a small retreat called Re-Wilding Imagination.
It’s intentionally intimate because the work we’re doing doesn’t survive the noise and bustle of performance or crowds. This isn’t a retreat about how to produce more or work harder or fix yourself. You won’t find any promises of breakthroughs on demand or re-invention by Sunday. Actually, it’s an invitation to slow your nervous system down long enough to hear what has been trying to speak underneath the fury and the sound.
We’ll be practicing the ancient arts of communal creation, ritual, shared inquiry, silence, wisdom counsel, and learning how to direct our attention exquisitely. The Sonoran desert will be doing so much of this teaching for us as we surrender to the wild. I’m there to help you stay with what arises instead of pushing past it.
If your well feels dry, this is a time of clearing out the debris, to honor what wants to flow in. To deepen your depths. If you’ve been moving fast for a long time, if you’ve lost contact with what once felt alive, this is a place to remember your purpose, your passion, your creative spark. I hope you’ll join us.
There are just three spots left!
Sunday, January 18 at 10am PST, I’ll be teaching the one, the only Friedrich Nietzsche. This class is for anyone who feels creatively muted or half-alive and wants language and courage for turning the switch back on. We’ll be diving into some of his most important concepts like amor fati (learning to love our life), eternal recurrence, and the will to power. I’m so excited to do this deep dive together in the Creators Collective! Don’t worry. No philosophy background required. Just honesty and a willingness to begin. You won’t want to miss it!
Hey, thanks for reading this this far. I hope something in here nudged you back toward yourself. Not in a dramatic, life-altering way. Just enough to feel your own heartbeat again. If there’s a next step, let it be something small and your own. Pick up the thing. Enter the room. Stay a little longer than you normally would. That’s usually where it starts.
Remember, create your self alive!