These last two weeks life has pretty much been following on from my last post and I’ve been trying to work on understanding what anxiety means to me and my creative process. AKA “I had holidays over the Easter break and have spent my days doing as little as possible”.
I’ve been thinking a lot about giving myself space and time to breathe. In my last session with my therapist, we spoke about how I overwork my thoughts, my life and just me in general. After taking time to let that sink in, I just felt exhaustion overwhelm me. It is like the last two years of overworking every element of myself caught up with me.
At around this time, I serendipitously reached a chapter in the book I am currently reading (First we make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson) which discussed the idea of creating ‘space’ when living with anxiety.
The sense of creating space is not new to me, it is something I yearn for and seek at every possible turn. Ironically, much of my anxiety is set off by not knowing when I will be able to feel this sense of space again. This isn’t a physical sense of space, but a feeling of having room to breathe in my own world. It is that feeling when you wake up and know there is nothing pressing you to leave bed, you can just get up in your own time. And then you do- you just casually get up and, as there is nothing pressing you, you can then move to the activity or motion that just feels like exactly what you wish to do. Take a bath, watch some TV, sit in the garden, paint a dolphin. It is freedom and flow and when I find that space, the things that I need to process and feel naturally just float to the surface and move on.
I often feel like I don’t have space or time, but strangely I have managed to find plenty of it once I started focusing on it. Even more strange is that giving my self space to breath and just be seems to have given me more time to do the things that matter most to me, like painting and day dreaming. I think this is because taking some time to naturally flow into what I want to do has given me pause to decide what is a priority for me and leave what is not useful or meaningful for my development.
In the next fortnight, I’m going to continue this process of flow and see where it takes me. Hopefully this means that my next post will be slightly more upbeat. Till then.