CT: Wrestling Angels
One of my favorite Madeleine L'Engle quotes is this: "Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling."
I think that it captures pretty well the experience of being an artist, a writer. At least it captures my experience. In the last few years as Writer becomes more and more my full-time image of myself, I've started to accept both the incredible parts of being an artist and the more difficult ones. I've started to understand how my own mental states feed into my art, and how the fluctuation in my well-being is going to affect both my art and my life.
Anxiety is a huge part of this. In retrospect I've been a pretty anxious person since the beginning. My mom called me her "happy baby", but worry has been a constant for me for as long as I can remember. That's the dichotomy that I'm finally learning how to navigate. I am both an incredibly cheerful, relentlessly positive person, and a person that feels huge amounts of anxiety on an almost daily basis. It's easy for me, as a relentlessly positive person, to pretend that anxiety doesn't exist. But ignoring it doesn't make it go away. It doesn't help me move through times when anxiety gets the better of me. Ignoring doesn't actually seem to do much good at all.
With all of the political and social tumult of the world in the last months, I've been trying really hard to take better care of myself (and the people around me, but that's probably a separate post). I've actively worked on focusing on things that feed into my soul, and watching out for the things that cause me trauma or make me worry. I'm not great at it. But I'm learning.
I had a panic attack this week, the first one in a few months. But oooooh boy, it was a doozy. Like any time I get a cold/flu/whatever, the symptoms snuck up on me and seemed unconnected until I finally figured out what was going on. And once I did, it was relatively easy to take my meds, focus on my breathing, and hunker down until it subsided. While I did all that, I tried to make a list of symptoms that I'd missed over the hours, days, even weeks leading up to the panic attack that I could try better to recognize next time. Because it doesn't always look like panic attack territory until you're standing in the middle of the storm.
Sometimes it's not sleeping a few nights in a row, and compensating for that with ever-increasing caffeine during the day.
Sometimes it's bowing out of every social event you get invited too because you're just so tired all the time lately.
Sometimes it's sitting down to work and staring at a blank page for an hour because you can't get your fingers to move, even if you know the scene backwards and forwards, even if you can recite every line from every character in your head.
Sometimes it's weeks of increasingly intense Big Feelings. Higher and higher highs, then lower and lower lows, like a washing machine that's been knocked out of balance.
As a writer, as an artist, as a person, I know that I'm going to struggle with my anxiety and probably my overall mental health for the rest of my life. The only thing I can do is learn how to navigate it, learn how to recognize landmarks that I'm headed down a scary path and need to course correct right freaking now. Then just maybe I can feed all that extra energy that's bopping around my head into work or something to keep it from boiling over.
Okay, I know that was a novel. But this is a very real part of who we are (at least who I am) as writers and I know that we're not alone here. So maybe the best we can do is learn from each other, help each other learn to navigate.
I hope you all had a good week. Be good to each other!
CT
I think that it captures pretty well the experience of being an artist, a writer. At least it captures my experience. In the last few years as Writer becomes more and more my full-time image of myself, I've started to accept both the incredible parts of being an artist and the more difficult ones. I've started to understand how my own mental states feed into my art, and how the fluctuation in my well-being is going to affect both my art and my life.
Anxiety is a huge part of this. In retrospect I've been a pretty anxious person since the beginning. My mom called me her "happy baby", but worry has been a constant for me for as long as I can remember. That's the dichotomy that I'm finally learning how to navigate. I am both an incredibly cheerful, relentlessly positive person, and a person that feels huge amounts of anxiety on an almost daily basis. It's easy for me, as a relentlessly positive person, to pretend that anxiety doesn't exist. But ignoring it doesn't make it go away. It doesn't help me move through times when anxiety gets the better of me. Ignoring doesn't actually seem to do much good at all.
With all of the political and social tumult of the world in the last months, I've been trying really hard to take better care of myself (and the people around me, but that's probably a separate post). I've actively worked on focusing on things that feed into my soul, and watching out for the things that cause me trauma or make me worry. I'm not great at it. But I'm learning.
I had a panic attack this week, the first one in a few months. But oooooh boy, it was a doozy. Like any time I get a cold/flu/whatever, the symptoms snuck up on me and seemed unconnected until I finally figured out what was going on. And once I did, it was relatively easy to take my meds, focus on my breathing, and hunker down until it subsided. While I did all that, I tried to make a list of symptoms that I'd missed over the hours, days, even weeks leading up to the panic attack that I could try better to recognize next time. Because it doesn't always look like panic attack territory until you're standing in the middle of the storm.
Sometimes it's not sleeping a few nights in a row, and compensating for that with ever-increasing caffeine during the day.
Sometimes it's bowing out of every social event you get invited too because you're just so tired all the time lately.
Sometimes it's sitting down to work and staring at a blank page for an hour because you can't get your fingers to move, even if you know the scene backwards and forwards, even if you can recite every line from every character in your head.
Sometimes it's weeks of increasingly intense Big Feelings. Higher and higher highs, then lower and lower lows, like a washing machine that's been knocked out of balance.
As a writer, as an artist, as a person, I know that I'm going to struggle with my anxiety and probably my overall mental health for the rest of my life. The only thing I can do is learn how to navigate it, learn how to recognize landmarks that I'm headed down a scary path and need to course correct right freaking now. Then just maybe I can feed all that extra energy that's bopping around my head into work or something to keep it from boiling over.
Okay, I know that was a novel. But this is a very real part of who we are (at least who I am) as writers and I know that we're not alone here. So maybe the best we can do is learn from each other, help each other learn to navigate.
I hope you all had a good week. Be good to each other!
CT
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