She does not know when her idea will come.
She feels like it’s been an eternity since anything good came to her mind, but maybe it’s only been a few months…or half a year for sure. But the more she waits, the more it seems like it is never going to arrive.
She spends her days preparing for said-idea’s arrival. She reads many books, she looks at her emails, she paces around in galleries, she goes on walks, takes long showers. You really never know when or where it will arrive so she has become crafty at being open for ideas anywhere and whenever. Always a phone in her pocket ready to write down the newest grand idea that comes to her mind, she is always ready to be hit with the idea. But it’s been a while and she starts to notice that the phone just feels like weight in her pocket. This waiting starts to exhausts her.
She asks a robot in her computer for some help with locating an idea. The robot mirrors her language in an overly positive tone. She decides the robot doesn’t really know what it’s like to wait for an idea, it’s too human an experience.
She turns to esoteric resources to hopefully gain insight on when this idea with fucking come. Listening to astrology reports, she knows now is a time of rest, but also a rich time of possibility. No idea comes. She consults her tarot cards, asking when this idea will arrive. She pulls JUDGEMENT. The card depicts a grand figure in the clouds with a horn, calling to all the figures below on the earthly ground, rising from their graves. She studies the card and believes she is one of the figures rising from the dead. “Ah! So it must be soon!” She waits. There is no call from up high. It does not arrive.
She tries to accept fate. The idea isn’t coming. It’s okay. She doesn’t always have to have ideas. She can just be and focus on her own breath and let the worries of her lack of ideas flow downstream in the river in her mind, calmly floating away and out of her mind. But she also knows she is sorta just doing to meditation to make a clear path for the idea to enter her mind uninterrupted
She scrolls on her phone each night as hours seem to melt away and strangers in far away countries tell her how to change her life to be more supportive to new ideas. She saves the videos, feeling a moment of possible success, but when she wakes the next morning, these brilliant ideas are rubbed away from her mind without notice like the sleep rubbed away from her ideas as she waits for her coffee to brew.
When she -shyly and rarely- opens up about her lack of ideas and her performative business of preparing for her idea to arrive, she is told it sounds like she is building a nest. Is that an idea? She thinks about birds nesting and wonders about how the waiting and anticipation of babies hatching makes the birds feel productive. (As she imagines being an expectant mother might make her one day feel productive. That producing life would be many times more important than just any old idea.) She thinks about how they must feel preparing a nest with sticks and scraps they gather for ultimate comfort when these chicks emerge. She thinks (and hopes) that this act of gathering might make them feel meaningful in their lives. But mostly she just thinks about the seabirds she saw on a trip once and how the guillemot didn’t even bother making a nest but instead just hatched an egg with a pointed end for the egg to spin around in circles if ever knocked into by other birds. And how they constantly had to watch out for hungry seagulls swooping down, and clumsy feet of other birds landing on the same rocky peaks that held their eggs, only for their children to jump off the cliffside and go on their own way after three weeks. She wondered if bird parents ever got annoyed by their chicks.
She resigned that this was not an idea and decided to move on, still waiting for an actual idea
Somedays, she becomes so exhausted with her waiting that she cries, cries while questioning if she’s ever experienced a real idea in her whole life or has she just been faking it all this time? The book she wrote. “Was that even my idea? The topic is so familiar. Anyone could have that idea” Her Master’s thesis. “Well that’s a bunch of other people’s thoughts I clobbered together” Her last artist residency. “That idea was technically my father’s first, he introduced me to the subject, it’s not really all mine.”
She questioned how much of herself was ever actually creative as she boiled her eggs in the morning, noticing the crack in the shell had allowed some of the egg white to seep out and start to solidify in the shape of a big bubbly boil. She remembered once looking into a form of fortune telling from cooking eggs, and wondered if that could be an idea, forming interpretation on other people’s futures through the shape an egg makes when boiled in water. The big bubbled boil separated itself from the egg and floated to the surface. She tried to decipher what that meant for her. She believed it was another figment of her ideas leaving her behind, rising to the surface while she, the now over boiled egg, stayed in the deep.
She resigned herself to just eat the egg, to stop wondering when the idea would come. To just let her egg be an egg and not another symbol. She covered it in salt and pepper and brought it to her mouth, enjoying the warm taste of the egg’s yolk melting on her tongue. She thought to herself that if the egg could just be an egg, maybe she could also just be. This waiting for brilliance may not be the best way to be. And the egg was really good at just being an egg.
Image – a broken guillemot egg held by Captain Andy
Thank you to Ioana Lupascu for hosting Rural Relations Writing Club where the first draft of this text was written.
Text was printed in Multi Tool Press at KIOSK Rotterdam, 2026