I feel suffocated. When did it become so difficult to feel even an ounce of inspiration? Flashback to nine years ago, 2005, and that is when my creative streak peeked. I’m only eighteen years old and I already feel like I have nothing left to give. I keep hearing that it’s “normal” for me to feel as though I can never be as creative, imaginative or spontaneous as my ten-year-old self but I refuse to believe that age is the only factor in this equation. Like always, I question if it has something to do with my generation as a whole.

Though I participate in social networking, youtubing, tumblring, etc, as much as the next eighteen-year-old of 2013, I also tend to be the harshest critic of my particular generation’s flaws. We are constantly connected to some life-sucking device that manages to feed our every desire. Facebook makes you feel social and wanted through “likes” while Instagram allows you to document your entire life, day by day, through pictures. When we’re not texting, liking, following, reblogging, posting, tagging, chatting, etc, what are we actually doing? I don’t mean to sound cynical, especially because I, too, find the impulse to stay connected almost addictive. I’m merely trying to voice that I am scared. I fear that I’m losing myself as well as my potential. I wonder sometime if my life would be any different as an eighteen-year-old in the late 60’s or early 70’s before cellphones and the global internet takeover. Maybe instead of telling myself I’m going to use my computer to write and, instead, go on youtube or tumblr for an hour, I would actually get a notebook and start writing.

It haunts me to think about everything I would get accomplished without the lure to connect constantly on the brain. I miss being ten-years-old, with “nothing to do” when the possibilities in my bedroom were endless: from drawing to creating a movie with my dolls or even pretending to be in music videos in front of my mirror. Now, after years of googling, every time I want to create something my brain conjures up hundreds of images of people who already did it, which forces me to think, “Oh, well. Someone’s already done that so what’s the point?” That, right there, is the internet’s most damaging flaw. My generation is terrified to create because everything has been done and is paraded in front of our very eyes every time we log on to the internet. It would be an understatement to call this discouraging. Back in the day, someone would have an idea for a book and write it instead of realizing first that their idea had already been done. If people thought that way all the time, nothing would ever be created. I used to think I was so unique when I was child, that I could create something rare. Recently, this feeling has begun to diminish. I don’t know what’s creative anymore. It feels like everything has been accomplished and I’ve lost sight of where to start. Nevertheless, my goal for this year is to stop feeling this way.

I’m forcing myself to consider that I never lost the ten-year-old girl who constantly made something out of nothing when I turned eighteen, I just lost sight of her through years of unnecessary and, frankly, unrewarding media distractions. Enough is enough. Unfortunately, in the world I live in today, it would be unwise of me to completely detach myself from all social-networking. I have grown to recognize that there are aspects of it that are advantageous as well. I merely want to step back and remind myself frequently never to allow the internet to control me. I want to be the one to, instead, break the code and find out how to use the internet for my own creative benefits. If I can achieve this, I think I will regain the passion for creativity I had when I was a kid again instead of falling into the internet’s often tempting trap. Like Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up”.