Living with anxiety sucks.
But what is it like when it is your job, your life’s work to be creative and produce content for others and for yourself in a way that doesn’t make it look like your mind is a mess? The truthful answer is, you don’t. But it definitely is very hard to express your good ideas when your brain and emotions are not connecting with your hands, with your preferred medium of creation. In a commonly understood phrase, “artist’s block” “writer’s block.”
But the block you feel with chronic anxiety and chronic depression is different. It’s not that you don’t have the ideas, or that the ideas are stuck somewhere. Sometimes, when I’m anxious, the ideas are right there in front of me. Literally sitting on the table, half the drawing is on the paper, half the post is written, or the photoshoot is already scheduled and the outfits picked out. Sometimes everything is laid out for me already, and my brain still says, “no.”
I’ll have my entire day planned out in my bullet journal that I still somehow manage to sometimes keep up with. A list of the tasks I need to accomplish today, along with a few of the ones from yesterday, from last week, that I’ve left unchecked… I even feel refreshed after a good night’s sleep, I’ve taken time to primp myself up a little bit, feeling confident as I leave the house for a favorite cafe nearby the university district. I’m excited to get a good cup of coffee, set up shop with my laptop, journal, iPad, and grind out some work. But somewhere along the thirty minutes of public transportation travel, my mindset shifts.
By the time I’ve ordered my coffee and plugged in my computer, my mind is off somewhere else. My anxiety is kicking in, in a way that most people around me wouldn’t recognize. I’m not panicking, I’m not fidgeting (that much) but anti-creative thoughts are making their way into my brain. Much like some of the nights where I can’t fall asleep due to thinking of all the mistakes I’ve made in the last fifteen years, I’m somehow starting to wonder if what I’m doing is worth it. My mind slides off to other things I imagine to be unrelated to my art:
remember when someone told you that you were ugly in high school? remember when someone you cared about tried to leave you by yourself in the middle of an unfamiliar city in a foreign country? remember when you found out that one guy was cheating on you and how worthless you felt instead of being angry? remember when you shattered someone’s heart and how much you had to see them suffer?
Here I am, trying to do things like finish a painting, trying to write a blog post about fashion, or trying to finish designing a logo or greeting card I plan on selling. Totally unrelated, right? Help. I have to pause; stop. Instead of moving forward, my anxiety is lingering on old memories from my past that have sent me through a lot of pain and it’s trying to prevent me from moving forward and doing something as simple as draw, because some guy cheated on me.
I’ll leave my house in the morning because I’m feeling a creative block at home, and while I’m on my way to another place to work, my mind is reeling with ideas. But then when I get to the cafe, the anxiety blocking my creativity returns again. I know that I am good at what I do. Sometimes my anxiety keeps me from feeling it though, and keeps me from pushing forward with my work.
Some days, I don’t end up getting over the block, and I end up finishing my coffee, rescheduling some of my tasks and just going home. Amidst the deadlines, amidst the great idea bombs I might have, some days the anxiety wins. As someone who is creative, who has anxiety, and is also a perfectionist, some days things just don’t get done.
I suppose on one hand it can all be viewed as unfortunate. But there is a silver lining to a creative’s struggle with anxiety, depression, or other mental issues. Complete and painless sanity is not ideal. As an artist, what would I do without my insanity? Or rather, what would I be able to create without my struggles? My anxiety might bring back some bad memories from time to time, but each time my anxiety uncovers them, I get to re-examine the lessons I learned, the meaning I have found in those memories and lessons, and use all of that to create art and content that provide another meaning to myself and hopefully to someone looking at it.
As a creative, my struggle with chronic anxiety might dampen a few days. But what creative would be amazing without a bit of insanity, a bit of struggle?
Painless sanity is not ideal.
Monochrome Caffeine 