Several years ago I read an account of one man's experiment in reality-bending. He decided to spend a week living as if he was already the artist he was aspiring to be. No more "I will be" or "I want to" - strictly "I am." For this guy the experiment was a real stretch; he was working graveyard shift in a job he hated, couldn't sleep during the day and had lost even the will to paint, let alone the inspiration.
He still wanted to find more congenial work and start painting again but suspected that, just possibly, his luck in these areas wouldn't turn until something inside him did. During the course of his week as a portrait painter who happened to earn his living as a custodian, he began to see his world with new eyes. By the end of the week he was ready to actually move forward with concrete plans. His story didn't imply that bad jobs don't exist or that you can wish yourself into a new situation. Rather, it pointed out that change starts with how we think about ourselves and our own possibilities.
Even if you, like me, basically enjoy what you do for a living, it still helps to examine how you're seeing yourself whenever you're mired in a creative slump. I've decided to try the author's experiment for myself during times where something feels stuck or not "in the flow."
Maybe his idea is like the "parallel worlds" convention used in fantasy & sci fi fiction - multiple possibilities exist and to an extent, we get to choose which ones we bring to life.
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