Art Heals

We know that's true: art does heal. It heals lots of things in lots of ways. I've been thinking about that a lot lately because I've been working on a profile of an artist who's discovered for herself just how true it is (Art Doll Quarterly, out in the fall of this year). 


Today I'm thinking about it even more because, not to sound too much like an old hippy (I wasn't; my parents wouldn't have tolerated a hippy in the house), I have to say: My head is in a very bad place this morning. I've written here many times about anxiety-related disorders, about obsessive-compulsive disorder and my tiny little propensity for worry. 


Snort. I actually snorted when I typed that. Let's be honest: a huge, HUGE tendency to worry. About anything, about everything. I can look back over my life, what little snippets I can remember, and see some of the worries, worries about everything from termites (when we moved into this old house) to cancer (always a huge worry--it's actually kind of funny, in retrospect and in view of what's happened in the last several years, how worried I once was about melanoma) to loss (how terrified I was, as a child, of losing my mother). 


Et cetera. If you're with me, you know exactly what it's like. If you don't get it, be glad. Be very, very glad. Unlike being a clean freak or being really well organized, being a worrier does not carry a lot of side benefits. Well, that's not true: I tell The EGE that people like me seldom have house fires. We seldom run out of gas on the highway. We are a very well-prepared people. 


But we are also a big pain in the butt. Not only to others, but to ourselves. Because, my dears, we worry. We worry a lot. And worrying is not fun.


Because I pay attention to this, I have arranged my life in ways to minimize my worry. We have good insurance. I practice mindfulness. I eat a diet designed to keep me on an even keel, both physically and mentally. In 2000, I quit watching tv and avoided newspapers, and I've really been careful about what I allow into my head.


And then I got complacent. Because things have been going so well in my brain, I'd begun to slip. I've been reading the Sunday New York Times and picking up the Midland newspaper several times a week, and then here lately I Netflixed a whole string of documentaries about everything from 9-11 to the economic collapse to the dire predictions about December 21, 2012 to the total disaster of last night, Escape from Suburbia, about peak oil and the looming energy crisis. I thought, you know, that I should maybe catch up on all this stuff that people reference all the time. The first time someone mentioned 2012 to me, I had no clue what they were talking about. I figured I needed to know this stuff.  


Now, I gotta tell you, in case maybe I haven't mentioned it before: I am a skeptic. (I am also a cynic, but that's a whole nother thang--as per a conversation I had the other night in which someone asked which I was and I said, "Both. Absolutely." I try to squelch my tendency toward the latter, but I wholly embrace the former.) So the whole December 2012 thing would be just one more wacko waste of time except for this tiny, tiny little fact: if enough people believe a wacko notion, someone, somewhere will do something stupid, something that may well lead to a chain of events with consequences we can't even imagine. So, for instance, if enough people talk about December 2012, there is someone, some group, someone bent on their own agenda, who is right this minute figuring out a way to capitalize on our fear and preoccupation. A large dirty bomb next November might be devastating, but one on December 21st? Whoa. You get my point, so I'm not following this thread.


So while the religious apocalyptic videos just made me rant at people's gullibility and lack of understanding how their own actions can impact other people in ways they can't even imagine, Escape from Suburbia is all too real. It's not about Mayan prognosticators or the second coming or the rapture; it's about the rapidly-diminishing natural resources on the only planet we have. 


Never fear--I'm not going into a long rant here or spreading dire warnings about the future and sharing my own nightmarish fears. Nope. That's not my point. My point is that, before the end of the video, as I felt myself becoming increasingly depressed and anxious, I went, "Whoa. What exactly are you doing?" I realized that these weeks of Netflixed documentaries have begun to have an effect on my brain. I feel unsettled, worried about the future, worried about cars and travel, electricity and water, health care and food. And, and, and.


I got up and took all the videos--even the ones we haven't watched yet--and packed them up to go back to Netflix. I'm not watching any more. I know things are, indeed, dire. I know that big change is inevitable. I also know that there's very little I can do about it except the things I do already. 


[Here let me be clear: I'm not advocating my way for everyone. Absolutely not. We have to have people, esp. young people, who want to change the world, who want to get into government and health care, find alternative sources of energy and change the way people think about their lives. This is vital. I do not want other people to be like me. I'm thinking here of 1) myself and 2) people who are like me, bless their hearts.]


It reminds me of my mother, who suffered from serious depression. To her, it was normal--I think both her parents were depressed, as well, although not to the extent my mother was. By the time I was in high school, I would periodically get my mother to a doctor and get her on antidepressants. She didn't "believe" in them, but she'd take them for me. After a couple weeks or so, she'd start to feel better. Lots better. And then, after a couple months, she'd quit taking them. She didn't need them, she'd tell me. She felt fine. It was an endless, frustrating cycle, as you know.


That's me and the news. Current events. Documentaries. Because I've avoided these for so long, I felt great! I was OK, and I was perfectly capable of reading the newspaper and keeping up with current events and finding out what I'd missed during the years I didn't.


Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I have always been a person with Anxiety Issues, and I always will be. Just because I know how to deal with that doesn't mean I've cured it. It doesn't mean you could bombard me with dire warnings about impending doom and I'd be able to go, "Eh. No biggie." 


Isn't it amazing that you have to keep learning things over and over? Isn't it even more amazing that the people you think have it all figured out are still figuring it out? I know that the way to keep my brain on an even keel is 1) not to feed it crap--horror stories about termites, cancer, the impending end of life as we know it, etc. and 2) give it plenty of other stuff to think about--art stuff, big projects, problems to solve. I KNOW that. But I got complacent.


Several months ago I got this note:

"I'm writing to thank you for Living the Creative Life, but most especially for Creative Time and Space. I bought the first book for myself and the second was a Christmas gift from my son. I follow your blog so I was expecting to enjoy your writing but what I didn't expect was how much it would change my life.
 I'm 50 and have had an anxiety disorder for as long as I can remember. I've seen doctors and been on all kinds of medications. I've talked about it with a therapist. I've researched self help and put together a tool box full of breathing exercises and distraction techniques. I wasn't expecting to find an answer to "how to stop my brain from getting trapped in little OMG circles" in an art book. Thank you!
 Giving my brain creative problems to chew on has not only reduced my anxiety more than anything else I've tried has, but it has really improved my art and the quality of my life. My head is now a much more pleasant place to hang around in.
 I wanted to let you know you are touching lives and it's very appreciated."
-C


(C very kindly gave me permission to share her note)


See? I know this. I know that the way to deal with anxiety is to fill my brain with projects and problems and the things that 1) keep it happy and 2) provide something useful to other people--at least that I *believe* is useful to other people. 


So I'm making some changes. I went in last night and adjusted the Netflix queue, deleting all the rest of the gloom-and-doom, conspiracy-theory, just-you-wait documentaries. I'm going to quit reading the NYT, never mind that there are some cool ideas and well-written articles. I'm going to remember that my brain is a living thing, changing constantly, and that I have to feed it carefully. The things I put into it will create the output, just like eating crap will make me feel like crap.


Now, lest you think this is about Burying My Head in the Sand, no. I know that things are, indeed, dire. It's one reason I don't drive every day--most days I leave the house only to go to Starbucks. I don't drive across town--I haven't for years. I try to walk to the bank and the post office when I have to go. I'm slowing replacing the windows in our house with more energy-efficient ones. We did the roof. We've gotten rid of large areas of grass, to save on water. All those kinds of things. Yeah, I get it. 


I do what I can. But I'm not going to dwell on it. There's a difference between being careful/cutting back, and lying awake at night, wondering exactly how bad things will get and exactly how miserable you're going to be before you die in screaming agony.


So: more projects. More art. More sharing of the kinds of ideas that make life fabulous. If you talk to me, you're going to find me woefully uninformed about all kinds of things. I won't know the names of people in the news or what wars are currently going well/poorly/abysmally. I will sound, to you, as if I'm not only poorly-informed but also quite possibly a fool.


That's OK. I'd rather be a fool, ignorant of much of the world around me, than to live with a brain that makes me totally, completely insane.


Thanks for reading this far--it's way too long, and it's probably Too Much Information, really, but I think it's important to talk about the less-than-rosy parts and ways of dealing with those. There are ways; the trick is not so much finding them as it is not losing sight of them once you find them. I've caught sight of mine just up ahead--excuse me while I run catch up~~


XO