You abandoned your creativity to be practical. Now the practical life is running on a creative deficit and you feel it in every gray morning.

You used to create.

Not for an audience. For the feeling.

The feeling of something existing that didn't exist before you touched it.

You drew on napkins. Wrote in margins. Sang when nobody was listening.

Then someone told you to get serious.

So you put the pen in a drawer. The guitar in the closet. The sketchbook under the bed.

You got serious. You got a job. You got productive.

And something in your chest went quiet.

At first you didn't notice. Life was loud enough to fill the gap.

But the gap grew. Slowly. Like a crack in a wall nobody's looking at.

By your late twenties the crack was structural.

You woke up functional but uninspired.

You performed well but felt nothing.

You could explain the feeling if asked. Burnout. Routine. Stress.

But it wasn't any of those.

It was the absence of the thing that made you feel alive.

You buried your creativity under practicality and called it growing up.

Growing up doesn't require amputation.

You amputated the most alive part of yourself.

You didn't grow up. You grew over. The creative version of you is buried alive under the practical one. And it's been knocking.