Day 41 - 10 feb
BLACK DRONE
Come back
Come back to me.
Where are you?
Letters
In amongst and between them
Ghosts in the grammar
Cursive and swooping
They cannot scale
Protected therefore
From all grift.
I see, over a massive, ploughed winter field
Your words swoop
Like an inky murmuration
parallel to my leg
Side-by-side
Or over-and-under
A Gun
Steel shoot
Picks off the black drones
That don't belong
Dinner with friends
Loose ends
All of this
Portends
To a door that opens in on itself
In panic - as in peace
Time stands still
Maybe that is why
We cannot comprehend the difference
And default for that
Which we already know
Like an old shoe
Hand made pleather
Boots are the first to come off
When the weary soldier beds down
So so so limited
This worldview
This channel
But it must be lived in
Loved
Unmasked
Ungloved
Pick up dead drone from potato drills
Find it was a Starling after all
And vomit up
Retch
Boke even
All that was false and unrepentant.
Bury it all
With crisp trowel
then simply
Walk away
Niall Campbell
The Slow Terror of Beginning Again
There is a particular kind of dread that arrives after an artist has re-entered the work. It does not come in the first flush of creation, nor in the hard labour of learning to speak the language of their medium again. It comes later—when the rhythms of making have become familiar, when the old instincts have woken up, stretched their limbs, and yet still, something is missing.
It is in this space that ennui creeps in, subtle as mould, turning the walls of creativity soft and porous. This is not writer’s block, nor is it fear. It is a slow and dreadful boredom, a spiritual fatigue masquerading as aesthetic weariness. I feel it a bit now. It is of course, Resistance up to it’s old tricks.
You have nothing to say.
It says.
The French have long been acquainted with this feeling. Ennui is not merely boredom; it is a kind of existential malaise, a recognition that even the most meaningful acts can, in certain lights, seem like the mechanical repetitions of a player piano. When Baudelaire wrote Paris Spleen in the 1860s, he was describing a Paris already alienated by industrialisation, its old rhythms replaced by mechanised ones. When Sartre’s Nausea arrived in 1938, it captured a Europe teetering on the edge of war, where even personal agency felt swallowed by vast historical forces.
If ennui was oppressive then, it is paralysing now.
The difference is scale.
For Baudelaire, modernity had created a world of too much movement and not enough meaning. But he lived in a time when books were still scarce, when artistic production was necessarily slow. Today, the sheer volume of creative output is beyond anything those writers could have imagined. Every second, new images, essays, films, songs, and novels flood the world, creating a paradoxical effect: while it has never been easier to make, it has never been harder to feel that making matters.
This is where contemporary ennui takes root—not in a vacuum of ideas, but in a world so saturated with them that the artist begins to feel like one more drop in an ocean that does not need them.
The Seasons of the Return
If resistance, as some have written, is the dragon that guards the treasure of creation, then ennui is the slow fog that makes it impossible to find the cave. When an artist restarts their work after a creative absence, they go through predictable seasons.
The Resurrection – The initial rush. Everything feels fresh. The return feels inevitable, as if the break had been a necessary incubation period. The artist remembers why they ever cared in the first place. There is a sense of being gifted another chance, of being back in the game.
The Reckoning – The slow realisation that enthusiasm is not enough. The work begins to feel effortful. The ideas do not arrive as fluidly as they did in the early days. This is where many falter, interpreting difficulty as failure rather than the natural resistance of momentum-building.
The Ennui – The most insidious stage. The artist is working, but the work feels thin, lifeless. It is missing something, though they cannot name what. This is where the real crisis begins—not because they doubt their skill, but because the process no longer feels vital. In our internet era, it is also the point where people really feel that—and they now believe they have quantifiable evidence to back up their resistance—that nobody remotely cares.
The Breakthrough or the Fade – A fork in the road. Some push through and find something new, often different from what they initially sought. Others drift away, quietly shelving the work, telling themselves they will return when it feels right. Some never do.
This cycle is not just a feature of artistic recovery—it is its architecture. Understanding these seasons helps counteract the feeling that something has gone wrong when enthusiasm fades. This is part of the process. I speak as a psychotherapist when I explain that ridding yourself of delusions of grandeur, solipsism, escapism, and entitlement is part of the deep psychological work of creation.
The work exists, and it objectively has not set the world alight. But such an event is exceptionally, exceptionally rare. How many women have doodled out snippets of fantasy stories in coffee shops? And yet there is only one J.K. Rowling, who is richer than the king. This is the Pareto distribution at play—the reality that, in terms of commercial viability, reach, and cultural penetration, only a vanishingly small percentage of creative works will ever break through into the mainstream.
But that is absolutely, absolutely not the point.
Those who stick with it consistently for a few years may not ‘blow up’—in fact, they almost certainly won’t, and this is just dispassionate probability speaking. But what they often will blow up is something much, much more valuable: the elements of self-delusion that were keeping them imprisoned within outdated and suffering versions of themselves.
By sticking through these phases—by accepting, dancing with, and around ennui—you gift your future self something: a deeper relationship with the truth of who you are and what it is you have to say. Often, after all of this comes surrender, and then, moments of real genius will break through. The process becomes intrinsically motivating.
These phases do not necessarily need to, nor do they, function in some sort of neat linearity. But they are like seasons—interpenetrating, cyclical, something to be aware of. They are normal. They can also be constructive, beautiful, and softening.
Boredom with your own work is natural. And in some sense, psychologically healthy.
The Midlife Reckoning
Ennui is perhaps most potent not for those simply returning to a creative life, but for those unearthing it for the first time in middle life.
It is one thing to be a young artist returning after a hiatus. But it is another to have spent decades in another field—parenting, finance, academia, engineering, medicine—only to wake up one day with the pressing need to create. These are not people “getting back” to something; they are discovering something that was buried before it even had the chance to form.
For them, the challenge is not just technique but identity. They are confronting the fact that their latent creativity has been waiting in the wings for years, and that the act of finally expressing it is not simply an act of making—it is an act of grief. Honour it as such.
Grief for the years spent ignoring it.
Grief for the road not taken.
Grief for the knowledge that no matter how much they create now, it will never be enough to reclaim the years lost.
This is why ennui can feel more existentially potent in these cases. Not only does the work itself begin to feel hollow, but the very reason for doing it comes into question. If they have survived this long without it, why does it matter now?
The Paradox of Creative Abundance
There is a further layer to this crisis, which is that while some people are creating at an industrial scale, most are creating less than at any other point in history.
The Pareto distribution—also known as the 80/20 rule—suggests that in most fields, a small percentage of people generate the vast majority of output. This has always been true, but the gap has widened dramatically. Social media has made it appear as though everyone is making something, but the reality is that creative production is now more centralised than ever. When considered as a proportion, a vanishingly small percentage of gloab population is truly generating creative works of any description
Compare this to pre-modern societies. A medieval peasant, even one without formal artistic training, would likely sing at the pub, tell stories by the fire, or carve simple decorations into tools and furniture. In a world without passive entertainment, everyone was, in some way, a creator.
Now, while a tiny fraction of people are producing endless volumes of content, the vast majority are simply consuming. They are watching others create, often while believing that the field is already too crowded to bother contributing. This has created an era of both creative saturation and creative starvation—a world overflowing with art that fewer and fewer people are personally engaging in.
The False Signal of Completion
One of the more corrosive myths in the artistic world is the belief that inspiration must be fresh, that great work is produced in bursts of divine energy. The reality is different. Many of the most enduring works have been created under conditions of deep malaise, of uncertainty, of an absence of urgency.
Beckett wrote The Unnamable in a state of near emotional paralysis. Leonard Cohen spent years refining Hallelujah, only to see it ignored upon release. Many of Joan Didion’s essays pulse with the weariness of someone for whom meaning has already begun to decay.
If anything, ennui is the actual condition of sustained creative practice. The mistake is assuming it is a problem to be solved, rather than a state to be navigated. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to accept it.
Walking Away, Walking Back
Sometimes, the only way through is to detach from the expectation that the work must feel meaningful in every moment. It won’t. And that’s fine.
The artist, particularly the one who has unearthed an unmet need to create later in life, must hold two truths simultaneously:
The work is always important.
The work will not always feel important.
Many will assume that because the second is true, the first must not be. But the opposite is true. The ability to create despite ennui is the difference between the person who writes one brilliant short story and the person who builds a life’s work.
Those who return to creative work, whether after a few years or for the first time in midlife, must remember this: the seasons will come and go, but the choice to stay in them belongs to you.