If you find yourself unable to create, let yourself be bored

Wet summer nights, writer’s block, and moving through the dread.

Jul 27, 2026

I’ve always hated monsoon season in my motherland. Mostly because I am deathly afraid of millipedes. I’d leave my house not looking once at the hot cement, eyes fixed on the towering trees or the buildings beyond. I’d walk fast past the patch of grass beneath the hill, above the drains, and before my wooden front door fence. I never looked, but I knew they were always there. When summer came around, they were all dead and dried up. Their deep burgundy shell turned into this ashy grey—almost the same color as the ground they were plastered to, like fossils. I still couldn’t bear to look at them. When the sun is out, no one is really outside to enjoy it back home. Perhaps it is too strong and too constant that we take it for granted. It burns my back. I often find thin peeling patches of white paint stuck on my shoulder blades from leaning on poles at the skytrain—another courtesy of the sun, which takes all my energy on the 15-minute walk to the station and of the poles which stand there all day long. It’s funny to me that living things sweat and regain their aliveness from the sun while objects dry and age. Well I guess we all age.

People at home do prefer summer over monsoon season because its madness swallows the streets whole. But preference over something is different from choosing to love it. It is only after I’ve lived in a city with passing seasons that I get to truly understand the magic of summer.

On the first few warm days of the year, I felt the honesty in the air that this was going to be the best summer yet, but it seems that the flowery loves and sticky palms were not as sweet as promised. Still, I say it’s my favorite season.

It’s been such a wet summer here in New York this year. The humidity reminds me a lot of the thickness of the air back home. I would catch myself looking at dirt patches on the streets to see if the millipedes were crawling or curling into little red balls. I have never seen one in New York yet, but I look every time.

I’ve spent the majority of these past few weeks indoors watching the rain and the apartment right across from me, which seems to always have the TV on longer than me. From my bedroom window, I watched the red building nearby with the beautiful rooftop patio. It housed small black round tables and tanning chairs with white cushions. The floor had turned pink from the sun damage. It had been raining so much that the little man with the bright orange tee decided to take down all the chairs yesterday. Strange that they weren’t withstanding the heavy pours as well as the seemingly delicate flowers in the garden up there, but maybe they were drowning too, in secret.

I sat there and watched the day darken, filled with an overwhelming dread over everything I had recently read or written––a horror I had yet to experience to this extent. My threshold for annoyance no longer knew grace. I had been reading The Happy Hour by Marlowe Granadose, which had been recommended to me by a good friend. It was about two 21-year-old girls spending their first summer in New York doing nothing, with little money but lots of charm. No ambition, just the pursuit of pleasure. What a waste! I sat there thinking whilst doing nothing too. Oh, what a waste as well. So I wrote down all the things I saw outside until I couldn’t anymore and then started walking in circles, texting all my friends to ask what they were doing.

Looking back in hindsight, boredom is not a bad thing, just like quietness. Maybe I was on the cusp of peace, but I couldn’t pass the test. As much as I tried to avoid the dullness, it always returns. People say they can speak things into existence; I think that can be true. But I don’t believe we can avoid things into non-existence.

If summer were my favorite time of the year, the blue hour would be my favorite time of the day. It is when the sky goes from black to blue right before the sun rises. Like summer, that window of time is to be earned. It is rare that I am awake for long enough to see it, but every time I do, the memory stays vivid in my mind for a very long time. I hardly witness it alone, always in great company and even greater conversations. As I am writing this piece, I look out the window and the sky is indigo blue. It is just as blue as I can recall from the blue hours. I forget to look at the sky sometimes. Each evening I only look out for the sunset, and if I’ve missed it I stop looking entirely. But the sky still turns the same shade of blue after the sun leaves the horizon every day. Today, with these stormy clouds towering over the city, the patches of blue seem like inverted clouds, contrasting with the thick misty grey.

My high school friend, her college friend, and I were talking til the sun came up.

I find it maddeningly hard to be truly bored as there is an abundance of things you can do to avoid it—the easiest being going on your phone. The distractions are endless and numbing. Maybe boredom is hindering what you are about to discover. So I sat and sat and sat and let my mind go to places, out my window and into the water tank that reminds me of the first horror movie I ever watched where a daughter drowns in the tank and her ghost haunts the new tenants because she misses her mother, into the office building that never turns off its lights with the bald man stagnant and still, endlessly staring into his vertical monitor, into the windows with stacks of worn books instead of curtains—the pages facing out instead of spines, how they soak up the sun, worn out and relaxed, into the big bench in front of my building that seated a group of girls’ pizza boxes as they sat on the floor talking around it—what were they talking about? Perhaps life and love and how interchangeable those two words are.

When your mind goes out far enough, it will start to come back to you.

And that’s where the fun starts.

As much as I hate to be bored, it has proven itself to be necessary. In that hate, I’ve found similarities in things that I love, like the blue hour and its stillness outside of the room I am in. It feels like a secret. The monsoons I hated at home now make the sound of rain comforting, instead of a reminder of how inconvenient it will make the city. When it rains, it is both loud and quiet at the same time. It drowns out all the noises with its incessant window tapping, never bothersome, especially when it starts to drown the unimportant noises in your mind too.

So yes, let yourself be bored. Be filled with the dirty doubts and existential dread. Let it wash over you because the rain always stops someday.

Today was the first day I wrote in a while. I wrote something that I could stomach, churn, and maybe turn into something. I checked tomorrow’s weather forecast, and it’s a high of 74 degrees. Sunny with no chance of rain.

It’s going to be a beautiful summer day.