It’s May, one month after April and one month before June. According to where the month of May falls in the year, I bet all of you know what happens during this time. Classes start to wind down and eager students’ attention span levels sink to level negative infinity. College students graduate and are lured inside the broken down job search train. Basically, self-motivation doesn’t exist, forcing us to begin the time ticking game of hide and seek.

Self-motivation is very hard to maintain, even when school is in session. In fact, I can honestly say that it’s harder to stay motivated during the academic year than any other time because of the mountains and seas of school work we all had and have to do. And who can forget the hours of studying that comes with the stress and anxiety before standardize tests that don’t measure anything important. But that’s another topic.

The point of this article is to express how motivation comes and goes and to hopefully come to some agreement with all of you about the struggle of getting back on track.

Motivation is temporary, as the game player YouTuber, Markiplier, states in his 17^th comment reading video that was posted on May 23^rd of this year. He responds to a comment that asked him about how he as a video creator stays motivated to create new content and to keep persevering with recording game plays when things may get in the way from the progress. He explains that even if you’re passionate about whatever your interests are, there will always be periods of time where self-motivation appears at its highest potential then eventually decreases and the hardest part is seeking out that motivation from its hiding place. He says to always remember why you took on a certain project or wanted to improve your creative abilities or take on the challenge of improving your lifestyle in the first place. If we don’t have a personal reason or cannot find that strong motive for doing that thing, we have to drop whatever it was and find something else. We don’t want to waste our time on something that doesn’t have a greater purpose.

We’ve all been there and experienced what it’s like to be stuck in a rut and cannot find that spark of motivation anywhere. That fresh flow of new and innovative ideas usually doesn’t last the duration of a new project that you’re trying to accomplish or that new goal you’re trying to reach. For those who are creative and are very artistic through drawing or painting, to playwrights who are stuck with writers block, it’s difficult to move forward to the next image or the main focus of the next scene. For those who are trying to exercise more or improve their diet, which I know is one of the hardest things ever, it’s extremely tempting to give up ourselves to that heavenly choir sound when a levitating doughnut resides in the pastry shop window or that french fry aroma that never leaves your nose when you walk around the county fair.

Life also gets in the way of progress. Things happen that can totally distract us from whatever we’re doing and reroute ourselves to focus on those things. It may take time to get over the events that halted our progress, but like Markiplier said, that bigger reason is the key to keeping that motivation going. So in the end, you don’t have to seek too far for the hidden motivation.