TwoCents | A useless life hack that (might) work

A quick disclaimer before I go into a long rant about this discovery: This is a hack that may work for all kinds of people but it is mostly tailored to those with hobbies in the creative industry for reasons you may later find out. You can take note if you find a lesson or two to learn or you can just laugh, skip to the end and comment ‘you need help’. Anyways, let me introduce you to the art of ‘Stress induced Genius’ I am terrible at naming things so this is the best I have got and yes, that is the hack. Believe it or not but I have spent years trying hard to conquer writer’s block, to scale all the unimaginable mountains that has stopped me from being a literary genius, I have given up and locked my laptop away at the countless failure and the numerous times I have sat in front of my screen, begging it to make me a New York times best seller. ‘Why can’t I write anymore’, ‘why does my work make us want to burn this page with acid’, ‘perhaps I am not as creative as I made myself to be’. It was a long two years of struggle, a long two years of being anything but the person I thought I was destined to be until I randomly stumbled upon this hack as most inventors do, unprovoked and unknowing.Insert drum roll, preferably jazz playing drum roll. The art of ‘Stress induced Genius’ Do not think too much about the name, don't try to understand or explain it to yourself, just follow my story as closely as a chicken chasing groundnut in a bottle. I started writing at work when I would get stressed because what better way to relieve annoyance than crafting beautiful lines of poetry that make you want to stab your fingers when you read them? This might have gotten a little too dark too quickly, but what is an artist without a repository of unnecessary dark humor? Anyways, the goal of this confession is a lot weightier than this flimsy introduction, so do your best, if possible, to read to the end. The ritual of crafting poetry when I wanted to scream at work didn't start intentionally. My brain would just stop understanding the screen, and I knew it was time to do something else. However, I was too restless to sit still, and thus began my stress-releasing poetry journey. It started lightly, but by the end of six months, I had crafted nearly 200 poems, and it almost didn't feel real. This was me who had permanently shut down her laptop, mentally drafted a memoir titled ‘Confessions of a failed artist’, deleted my e-library and ultimately gave up on the hope that I would ever make it as a creative writer as most writers do because we are a tad bit too dramatic. The Birth of a Stress PoetPicture this: It’s a Wednesday, your inbox is overflowing, and there is that one supervisor who keeps sending you messages like you are in a relationship and stopping by unnecessarily to give you a repeat of said messages as though you could not read. Or it is Friday, you have managed to convince your mind that closing at 7:30pm is okay even when it should be a criminal offence to end Friday at any time later than 2pm. At the same time, the money in your bank account is playing hide or seek. Well at this point, it is playing only ‘hide’ and you strongly dislike your job. You live alone so you are confident that there is no hot meal or a massage waiting for you at home. The journey home takes one hour and it is so cold and full of unbathed souls that you dread public transport. Sound familiar? In those moments of utter despair, sitting at my desk, thinking of all these many problems and being bored to my bone marrow, I decided to start writing again. I needed something, anything and you can not easily whip out a pot to make jollof rice at the office so I had to do something else. I started to write instead, i went back to where i had abandoned this talent I may or may not have and tried to put something on paper. It was horrible, I tell you. It was terribly pathetic that I quit the next day. Not my job, thankfully but the writing thing. The words would not flow, my ideas fell to the ground and I was more frustrated than I started. I tried again a couple of days later, persisting out of boredom , but if it works, it works. Slowly, the words started to flow, albeit not more than two lines but I was beginning to see things that would make my nursery school letter work teacher proud. It did not end there though, the more i wrote, the more i started to notice my weaknesses and then I resurrected my library and started to read. The more I wrote, the more I read and the less stressed I became, The less stressed I became, the more ideas I gained, The more ideas i gained, the more ideas I had to writethe more I wrote, the more I read and the less stressed I becameSee the cycle. See how a beautiful thing started.I badly wanted to impress myself and by the end of six months, I had read so many poems and became familiar with so many poets and written so many pieces that it was unbelievable. I am probably going to have to change the title of my imaginary memoir. Lessons Learned in the ChaosSo, what did I learn from this whirlwind of words? For starters, I realised that stress is not just an obstacle; it can also be a catalyst for creativity. You never know the beauty laying deep beneath the long line of insults about your extremely petty supervisor. The next lesson you may find in this is how hard but magical consistency is. The path to achieving any type of goal is never cute. It is long and full of very ugly moments. You start a piece, the idea burns in your mind and you think you are Shakespeare reincarnated, one line down the road and you can't wait to throw your book out the window. Stick to it, that’s the lesson. You can't furiously close the book but don't chuck it out the window. Tomorrow, open it and resist the urge to tear the page. Try again, it will be bad, horrible at best or you might surprise yourself and write art. The next day, try again and again…erase, cancel, throw it close to the window but not out of it and don't stop trying. The final lesson learned is that you have more capacity than you think you do. If I had set out to write 200 poems at the end of 6 months as a goal, I would have never believed I could do it. It would have started and ended after 3 failed attempts. But somehow I discovered this genius by sticking persistently and stubbornly to a cause. Just writing everyday, whether it made sense or not. This is beginning to sound too much like a motivational aspire to perspire speech. Point in, go back to your creative outlets, the one you abandoned because of the choking grip of life…Whether it’s writing poetry, painting, or even knitting tiny sweaters for your houseplants, channel all that pressure, stress, demotivation and imposter syndrome into stubborn consistency. Because, after all, sometimes the most beautiful things arise from our darkest moments—and you might just end up with a collection of poems that could rival Shakespeare. Or at least give yourself a good self condemning laugh or make some good self discovery. Even better, it is cheaper than therapy. Now that I think about it, ‘stress induced genius’ does sound terrible. We will call it ‘Stubborn Consistency’, yes, that is the new name; The art of Stubborn consistency.

Other insights from Esther Omemu