When Did I Lose My Spark?

And how can I get it back?

I’m interspersing installments of my Social Media History Series with my regular content. This week’s newsletter is on one of my regular content topics and my Social Media Series will resume soon.

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My spark was sparking in my 20s ✨ At my 27th birthday party, September 2002

I am pulling myself away from this ridiculously feel-good TikTok of a Pass the Mic episode featuring SWV to write this — but it’s okay, it will all tie together in the end.

Lately, something has been off. Maybe it’s my brain chemistry because I feel dead inside. Like I’m just going through the motions of day-to-day life, completely checked out. My antidepressant dose might need to be adjusted. I can always tell when it’s too low (I feel anxious and depressed) or too high (I feel exhausted and numb), but this time, if it is indeed an issue with my medication, I have no idea what the adjustment needs to be. Because I feel a mixture of depressed and numb.

If this particular feeling (or lack thereof) persists, I’m going to contact my psychiatrist for his take. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about how when I was younger, I used to feel the opposite of dead inside: incredibly alive and bursting with life.

So I’ve been on a mental archeological dig: When did I lose that spark I used to have?

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought or wrote about losing my spark. Almost two decades ago, in the summer of 2006, I wrote this blog post lamenting about how I lost myself in 2003. But even in that post, I can still feel my old energy and vitality radiating off the words and the long, breathless sentences. I poured out a litany of memories that were still fresh at the time; reading them now feels like recollecting somebody’s else’s life that I can barely recall.

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Something just isn’t clicking in my work and my life these days. Things feel more effortful than they need to, and like I’m working harder than the results are portraying. Like I’m pushing too hard in places that aren’t budging. I tend to see things (and people) how I want them to be instead of how they really are; I tend to blur reality in favor of living in my own fantasies. I think if I can be squarely in reality, I’ll see that there are several things that need to change. And maybe changing those things can help me get my spark back again.

Looking back, I think it happened in phases. But there’s a clear point where I started to lose my spark, and an obvious culprit responsible for the chipping away that led to this loss: