The End of Apathy

How Care Returned with an Urgency to Create

I’m a poet possessed, a writer obsessed. After years of anhedonia and depression, of cruising through my career in numb success, it feels as though bolts of inspiration are now coursing through my body. Apathy’s absence of joy and its cold refusal to care led to collapse, yet that very failure opened the door to renewed vigour for living on my own terms.

The darkness became so lifeless that I no longer knew why I was here. Everything I did was for everyone else. I took from the abundant fruit of life without ever offering any of my own. I was hiding from the world and from myself.

Now I know what it is to have a purpose, a question I had wrestled with my entire adult life. To wake early and feel drawn forward instead of dreading the day ahead. Ironically, it was writing that broke the dam. Years spent consuming ideas in search of answers have reversed their flow into expression, a vein of lifeblood freed from the vault of my mind.

The collapse of everything I had built, my mind’s forced reboot, allowed an update of awareness to take root, seeding the tools for growth. Leaving my career felt like arriving in a desert with pockets full of keys and nothing in sight to open. For months I wandered there, lost and directionless. From that metaphorical desert to the literal Alps, I walked for a month with the simplest of goals: to immerse myself in daily awe, to find progress in pace, to feel the rhythm of the natural world and its indifference to my plight, to wash away my apathy.

When my parents asked if I could make a photo book of the trip as a keepsake, I was not enamoured at the prospect. I was tired of standing at a desk producing for others. Yet I soon realised I was producing for myself, reliving memories and appreciating the magnitude of what I had done, six hundred kilometres alone, a tent for cover, wild animals for company.

I had all the tools and experience to create whatever I wished, yet I remained despondent.

For several months I meandered back home with a sense of rising urgency. I found myself renovating my rental after years of resigning myself to run-down spaces not my own, why feather another’s nest? A bead of restlessness had surfaced, energy demanding direction.

The displacement of emotion had me channelling it any way I could, as my subconscious flailed without a plan. But I was improving my lot. I was shaping a future, first with a sledgehammer and then with a paintbrush.

I was building meaning into the mania. I went from painting walls with acrylic to canvases with oil. No longer would I live in a space without identity; it was time to adorn the walls with my own art.

The same creative career that had withered my sense of self began knocking like an old friend, reminding me that my skills still had a place in service of my own vision.

Among the tools at my disposal were pens and paper. Decades of writing for others had made me wary of seeing my own thoughts take form, yet I began jotting them down as they came, small lyrical sketches, fragments, or ideas. I had no aspiration to share them; they were simply a means to untangle myself.

And I noticed it helped, or perhaps I was painfully self-conscious that it did. Could it benefit others? Would anyone care?

Perhaps that is today’s great problem, that we either care too much, or not at all, twisting our output into the sins of pride, envy, greed, and wrath.

Does everything have to become corrupted by money and tainted by fame?

That was where I diverged from the mean. I wanted to leave a piece of myself in the world, something for the few who might find meaning in it, breadcrumbs leading to a small loaf of enrichment. So I wrote with compulsion, imperfection, and honesty.

Months of weekly essays later, the purpose endures. The less my work is read, the more I want to write.

I am no longer chasing attention. I am running with conviction.