A Brain That Never Learned to Idle

If you’ve been around here for a while, you already know that I disappear sometimes. Not dramatically, not because anything is wrong, but because stepping back from the noise of social media is something I have to do intentionally and regularly to stay creatively healthy. It’s not a struggle for me the way it is for some people. I genuinely love my farm and my solitude. I always have. I do my best work in the quiet, and protecting that quiet is how I protect the work. Some people mistake that for disengagement or distance, but I promise you, when I’m offline I am very much on behind the scenes.

Which brings me to you newcomers! Welcome, welcome, welcome. I have no idea how you found me while I was off being a hermit, but here you are, and I’m so glad. Apparently starving the algorithm works. Nobody told me that, but I’ll take it.

If you’re new, here’s what you need to know. This is a space where I talk honestly about my life as a creative, my struggles, my fears, my stories and yes, my art. You can find free short story reads right here and over at CurtissLynn Publishing, so poke around and make yourself at home.

It gets bored really, really easily. And when it does, it doesn't just sit quietly with a cup of tea. Boredom for me has a dark edge to it. When I go too long without switching gears, without feeding that need for something new or different, it slides into something heavier. Tears show up. A gray kind of stillness settles in that I've learned to recognize as a warning sign. So I've had to get smart about it. And over the years I've learned that switching gears isn't optional for me. It's maintenance.

What sometimes causes creatives to become bored easily?

It's a question worth asking, because from the outside it can look like restlessness, lack of discipline, or an inability to commit. A creative brain doesn't always read as a creative brain to the people watching it work. The line between someone who needs variety to function and someone who simply hasn't found the right thing to commit to isn't always clean, at least not in my experience. But whether the label fits on any given day or not, the real answer to why I struggle with boredom is a lot more complicated than any of those explanations on their own.

Boredom proneness in creative, multi-disciplinary people tends to come down to a few overlapping factors:

• High need for stimulation. Brains wired for creativity and novelty-seeking have a lower threshold for under-stimulation. Once something becomes predictable, it stops generating the dopamine hit that made it interesting in the first place. Me.✋🏻

• Fast processing speed. When you can quickly master or mentally “solve” something, the challenge disappears and so does the engagement. You’re essentially lapping the activity. Definitely me. ✋🏻

• Broad curiosity. People who thrive across multiple domains, writing, painting, publishing, farming, gardening, baking… aren’t wired for depth-only focus. They need lateral movement. Staying in one lane too long feels like deprivation, not discipline. Gotta keep moving! ✋🏻

• Sensitivity to meaning. Highly creative people need a sense of why behind what they’re doing. When the purpose feels unclear or the work feels mechanical, engagement drops fast. Yes, I am a "why" student. Always have been. ✋🏻

• High internal standards. If your vision of what something could be outpaces what you’re currently producing, the gap can feel demoralizing rather than motivating and boredom is sometimes a mask for that frustration. Every. Single. Day. ✋🏻

What actually helps isn’t forcing focus. It’s designing variety into your structure, rotating between projects, setting artificial constraints to re-introduce challenge, and recognizing that the “bored” signal often means you’re ready to level something up rather than abandon it. If you sustain long-term work across multiple disciplines, your boredom probably isn’t avoidance.

It’s calibration.

I know. It sounds complicated. But it’s not.

Now add a childhood that kept your nervous system in a near-constant state of fight or flight, and that creative restlessness gets wired in even deeper. A brain raised on high alert doesn’t just prefer stimulation. It requires it. Stillness starts to feel like a threat. Ordinary calm registers as something being wrong. And when you finally aim all of that at a creative life, the engine runs hard and it runs fast. The catch is, it needs more than one track to keep running at all. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s just how the system works.

Which brings me to where I am right now.

I grew up in that kind of environment. And for a long time I thought switching gears was the same as giving up. If I walked away from a manuscript to pick up a brush, some internal critic filed it under lack of discipline and moved on.

I’ve since learned that critic was wrong. It’s it always?

Last year, I produced a novelette a month. Twelve months, twelve stories. I’m proud of that. I’m also not going to pretend it didn’t cost something, because it did. And that’s not counting my novels, and what I wrote for Micromance Magazine and Woman’s World, the series bibles, the course content, the seasonal submissions, and everything else that gets filed under “the business of being a writer.” By the end of the year I was wrung out in a way that had nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with having run one engine past its limits for too long.

So right now I’m painting (under both names).

Not instead of writing. There are three rough drafts on my desk right now. Five story premises with accompanying piles of notes that made perfect sense at 2 a.m. Six short story drafts. And an ideas list that, at this point, I can only describe as a cry for help.

But painting uses a different part of me. It’s quiet in a way writing isn’t. There are no words to find, no beats to hit, no character motivation to untangle. There’s just color and light and whether something feels true on the canvas.

For a brain wired like mine, that’s not a break from the work. That’s how the work stays possible.

I’ll be back in your inbox with words soon. In the meantime, know that the stories are coming. I’m just in the studio making sure the person who writes them is still in one piece.