Consuming media, books, goods, and essays devoured me last year.
- Drowning and wading through news stories.
- Reading book after book after book.
- Binge watching seasons of Gilmore Girls and Thirty Rock.
- Scrolling through Pinterest and Facebook for hours.
- Buying needless seasonal and nonseasonal junk from Walmart.
- Grading and grading and grading.
At day’s end, discomfort would ripple through my mind like an unwelcome tension headache.
Yeah, I read the news, finished a book, completed a series, pinned ideas for recipes, contributed to the economy, or helped students become better writers, but that’s a Chiquita banana wheelbarrow load of consumption.
Inhaling other people’s words and ideas–not producing anything original.
What the hell had I created???? Nothing, because over-consumption stifles creativity.
Consuming must be balanced with creating; otherwise, we’re just avatars in someone else’s rocking reality, bamboozled into passive docility.
Even though consuming tricked my brain into off-kilter disproportion, it inspired my creativity nonetheless.
Inspiration strikes people differently. Discomfort stokes mine, but other people’s creativity ignites my imagination as well.
If I hadn’t obsessively ingested last year’s news stories regarding the election, gun violence, and ridiculous hate, I wouldn’t have written poetry.
If I hadn’t read nor graded, I wouldn’t have blog post inspiration (except for Little Thing).
Must I paint the picture even further, or should that just be left to PBS and Bob Ross? Or to Little Thing (who is happiest when she’s creating) aspiring to be like The Joy of Painting icon: 
Get to the point Rambling Ram Jam; instead of incessantly devouring other people’s creativity, we need to balance it by creating.
I feel like more of a human being when creating instead of constantly consuming. Baking, cooking, sewing, writing, or painting suffices, and my world’s equilibrium is restored.
Because even though it’s fatiguing to live in a constant state of consumerism, it’s even more exhausting to exist without a creative outlet.
Mrs. Ram's Jams 