I'm hoping to get back into a blogging mode soon – bear with me.

2018 has been a challenging year. A deeply personal loss and a deeply personal fight has led to more days than I hoped of not wanting to get out of bed. And now, with half of my time spent between two cities, it's been tougher than I thought it would be to keep on top of all of the non-work-related projects I wanted to accomplish this year.

But what's been helping has been small moments of inspiration, and reminders of what it means to want to create.

One of my favorite musicians is MIKA, and if you've ever heard any of his songs, you know he has an incredibly unique voice and perspective and that comes through in all of his music, from "Grace Kelly" to "Last Party."

Sometimes when I'm in a creative rut, I'll listen to his entire discography, from start to finish, and there's such an incredible arc to it all that reflects his own personal story and his career. You really get a sense from his music that he's revealing bits and pieces of who he is, how he got here, and why he's creating.

For his "Origin of Love" album, he recorded these special tracks for Spotify where he introduced each song and gave a bit of background on how he wrote it and sort of the context of creating it, and it gave me such a deeper appreciation for that album and the story he was telling. Adele does it too with her music, and I think it's such an art to be able to tell a story like that through songs.

There are moments when I'm listening to music like that (the deluxe edition of "No Place in Heaven" is an A+ example of it, and if you've never heard MIKA's music set to a live orchestra, you absolutely must) where I'll get hit with this thought of, "Oh my god, I'm never going to be able to create something as beautiful as that," but the key thing here is that listening to this music makes me want to try – and that's the most inspiring thing about art.