What To Say When Nothing Is Heard?

My son is eighteen years old and has graduated from high school. With no current college underway, he is working at a restaurant, living at home and facing down an uncertain adult life in an uncertain time. He wants to be a creative professional, which I also happen to be, but I think the two things are only tangentially related. He seems like the kind of person who would want to do this no matter who I was. It also seems to me — based on what he has told me — that he has a normal amount of uncertainty about how to make that career happen, especially without currently being in college, a place where parents pay five figures for their children to be treated as an artist for five years in the hopes that it sticks.

Our talks on this topic often happen in the car at night, and the last time it came up, I found myself with the curious urge to avoid telling him how my life as a creative professional was actually going. Because for the moment at least, I wouldn’t say it’s going well. I’m currently finding it difficult to write. I’m currently finding that each day of writing feels long and slightly gray, insular and confusing. Aimless. I’m currently finding myself struggling not with what to say, but with what to say that I think actually matters, that I actually think is worth saying — an increasingly difficult task in a landscape in which everything is being said all the time which paradoxically means very little is being heard.

Sometimes I wish that I could write something that I don’t believe in just to get the deadline…