Endings are rarely as clean as we like to imagine. One chapter may be visibly closing, another may already be waiting, and still we can find ourselves staring at the horizon with no clear sense of what comes next. From a distance, possibility looks like relief. When it finally arrives, it can feel closer to vertigo. We can spend years moving towards one fixed point. Our choices become narrower but also simpler. There is somewhere to go and something definite to work towards. We become so accustomed to following that direction that we almost forget how to ask what we might choose for ourselves.

Then the horizon opens.

Suddenly, there are several directions and no obvious answer. The tunnel vision that once kept everything in order is no longer needed, but without it, the freedom we wanted can feel strangely unsettling. We are taught to fear limitation. We are rarely taught how to face choices. Moving forward may also require other chapters to end. Some of them have been with us for so long that they have become part of how we understand ourselves. Even when they no longer lead anywhere, closing them can feel like losing something. Perhaps that is why change can carry hope and grief at the same time.

I recognise this confusion most clearly in the way I create.

A muse can arrive with such intensity that it feels almost like a command. I see the painting before the canvas has even been prepared. I make notes. I draw outlines across loose sheets of paper. I collect colours, references, and fragments of thoughts. For a few days, or sometimes only a few hours, the idea feels urgent enough to rearrange my entire life around it.

Then, just as quickly, it leaves.

I return to those pages later and feel almost no connection to them. The plan is still there. The hand that made it is still mine. Yet the person who wanted to paint it seems to have gone elsewhere. Suddenly, I want another subject. Another room. Another way of seeing. The unfinished work begins to feel less like possibility and more like evidence. Evidence of inconsistency. Evidence of all the things I could have made but did not. This is where potential becomes a rather cruel companion. It points towards every untouched canvas and asks why I have not yet become the artist I thought I would be.

But I am beginning to question the accusation itself.

Maybe not every idea is meant to survive us. Some muses come to make us begin but have no intention of staying until the end. Some sketches belong to a former state of mind. They may have led me somewhere, even if they never became paintings. An abandoned work is not always a failure. Sometimes it is simply proof that something within me moved. Still, I do not want to dress confusion up as wisdom before I have earned it. There is a slump here. There is fear. There is also the uncomfortable knowledge that I could do more, coupled with the fact that I have not yet worked out what “more” realistically should mean.

Perhaps that is why I have returned to Bedlam Muses.

I do not have a neat conclusion. I only feel the need to speak from the middle of it. Maybe writing this is my way of picking up one of those old pages without forcing myself to finish the picture drawn upon it. I can begin again without pretending I am beginning from nothing.

For now, I am trying not to treat the slump as a verdict on my ability. I am returning to art in smaller ways: revisiting an old sketch, making a loose mark without demanding that it become a finished painting, and allowing an idea to be temporary. I am also trying to stop using unfinished work as evidence against myself. Some of it may still be waiting for me. Some of it may have already served its purpose. Perhaps the next chapter does not need to announce itself before it begins. It may take shape through the simple act of making something again. I still do not know what that something will become. But, for now, movement feels more honest than certainty.

® Strokes of Chaos