Do you wanna hear sth really shitty? My talent for painting refuses to wake up. I can't open it. I can feel it RIGHT THERE, I am subconsciously surrounding myself with literally hundreds of drawing pencils and watercolors, paper and boards and canvases - they are stacked in a crescent pile wall all around me. Every day I take something and decide to make some X-mas presents or random gifts or just greeting cards or something. I succumb to flipping through endless pages of Pinterest in search of inspiration. Having given up on any original concepts, I try to plagiarize something cute and innocuous, something everybody likes to make greeting cards for family. And I can't. I can't even copy what I see right in front of me. I used to be able to forge Van Gogh in my sleep, do realistic portraits from memory. I can't forge a fingerpainting kitten. It won't unlock. Most of my creative energy was going into a delightful project and that's been shot down, so ... the rest refuses to come out and play. 

Took me over a year to start taking portraits again after that bad client experience with photographs. Like part of my brain died during a stroke. It's the damndest thing, a very specific creative depression.

... Of course, it could just be my novel hogging all the attention to itself. It's been known to happen. But I doubt I'm that lucky.