Afternoon Tea: My personal guide to feeling inspired

And my process to creating a personal mental bookshelf of resources for your inner world

I am so excited to start this new side series Afternoon Tea, a column diving into creativity, inspiration, what ‘being an artist’ means to me, my personal insight and advice on staying creative, with occasional interviews. I love to have tea with friends and discuss creativity, so I thought I’d extend the invitation to my readers.

Care to join me for tea?

The Tea by Mary Cassatt, 1880

Afternoon Tea: My personal guide to feeling inspired

This afternoon’s tea: Black “Nostalgia!” tea with two sugar cubes and a slice of childhood lemon tart

I used to have this idea of inspiration as something I had to find, something I had to look for, something new. If I am not inspired, then I do not have inspiration. It’s not there.

But, over this last year, I’ve been on a personal wander through everything I love, my memories, my childhood, the cities I’ve lived in, the languages I speak, and have found that inspiration is a part of me—at all times. And the closer I become with myself, the better I become at understanding what my mind craves, and the less I am inclined to compare.

Inspiration. A word I almost despise. Only because I’ve seen and heard it used and pronounced over and over and over again, mostly on the internet. What inspires you? What inspired that? We are desperate to know the source of one another’s inspirations. Sucking it out of our favorite artists. Since the beginning of Instagram and Tumblr and Pinterest, we obsessively make mood boards and judge each other by what is on it. We scroll endlessly until something makes us feel, think, anything to awake our creative numbness. That’s inspiration, right?

I’m puzzled by the concept of creative numbness. “Lack of inspiration.” Quite truthfully, I don’t think that can be true. To be uninspired.

The definition of inspiration as we know it is rather recent.

Originally, inspiratus is a past participle of the Latin word inspirare, which means to breathe into, to excite, to inflame. According to the Webster dictionary, it is defined in English as “the drawing of air into the lungs” since the 16th century. And before this, it referred to an influence on a person from a divine entity, dating back to early 14th century.

inspiration noun

: the act of drawing in; the drawing of air into the lungs
: a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation

Merriam-Webster