I make no secret of the unique distraction that creativity gives me. The quiet around me as I concentrate on writing something new, drawing something pointless and trying to teach these things to our daughter is consuming and, sometimes, essential.
As I’ve tried to explain through my creative coping strategies campaign, using ANYTHING you enjoy should be able to create a calm in the storm, but I’ve realised recently that sometimes, when you desperately need it, your creative juices aren’t even producing a drip.
Although I use writing and drawing to help with anxiety and pain, I found out over Christmas that extreme stress creates huge difficulty in engaging with either. It’s hard to describe because these are passimes that I SHOULD adore, but for the last few weeks there’s been a complete lack of desire and lack of inspiration (sorry to sound wanky), and it’s left me wallowing in extreme levels of worry without even the thinnest cushion.
What do you do when your creativity is gone?
I went back to the drawing board.
I want to be clear, this was a period of anxiety that I’ve only experienced a couple of times in the past, and on those occasions I wasn’t as unstable as I am today. I had to watch through a window while my partner carried our daughter to hospital, as she needed emergency treatment for an auto-immune condition…and I wasn’t with her.
I can’t articulate how scared I was. I’ll probably sound melodramatic however I word it, and no words will do this fear justice anyway. But I was stuck in a state of pure, unadulterated panic, and I was alone. As someone with Panic Disorder I knew it wasn’t a safe situation to sit in. I needed help.
While waiting for news from my partner, I called a helpline (I have a dedicated mental illness and suicide helpline page if you need similar help) and spoke to a stranger for 20 minutes. Admittedly I spent most of it wailing through snot bubbles and salty teardrops, but the lady I spoke to was incredibly understanding, patient and kind. Although it was exactly what I needed, pressures of the service meant time was limited, so once I’d got my breathing under control she asked if she could do anything to help.
This was my inroad to explaining that I needed a distraction, that I couldn’t deploy my usual hobbies and I didn’t know what to do, that my thought processes were becoming dangerous and begging for any ideas at all.
She had lots…I mean LOADS.
Now, many of them were already known to me, but after 8 years of using and scrapping mindless distractions, I expected some repetition. However, inbetween the ideas of old were new creative tasks that worked nicely (provided I put my mind to it!).l I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but the following 30 minutes were less fraught, and for that reason alone I’m glad I asked.
So what did she say? What were her shining epiphanies that started to lift the heavy fog on my mind?
First, the alphabet!
She told me to look aroud the room and try to find an item for every letter of the alphabet.
Yes, you may have guessed, I’m still looking for an ‘X’ word, and I have to be grateful to our daughter for accidentally leaving me with a zebra. Being in the bedroom gifted me a quilt too. Now, I’m certain, somewhere out there is a person reading this who is now also, just like me, looking around their room for something beginning with an ‘X’. My partner did the same thing when I told him about it. After I finished the phone call, I must have spent half and hour on this challenge alone – it was the first one I tried.
Second task was one I’ve mentioned before but in an more in-depth way. She told me to use my senses to connect with the things around me, then think about the properties of those things and make a list of what I feel. For example, in the past I’ve simply said you should think about the things you can see, feel, hear, smell and taste. It works as a distraction but it can be over faster than Usain Bolt puts his slippers on. During the phone call I was asked to talk about something I can feel. I chose our ‘magic blanket’ and I told her I was holding the blanket and it was soft to touch. So basic. She asked me questions – ‘How does it feel when you touch it?’, ‘What colour is it, and does the colour change when you stroke it?’, ‘Are there other things in the room that match it and how do they feel?’. The list went on and on, and before I knew it, I’d been telling her about the incredible powers of our blanket for a few minutes. When we’d finished I scrutinised, fondled, sniffed, glugged and tuned in to as many things as I could, thinking carefully about the questions I could answer about them, and even wrote some down to keep myself in this helpful sensory-zone.
The final idea she gave me was, at it’s core, about counting…with a twist. Just like the alphabet task, this was about using my environment and finding items in quantites counting down from 10. Again, because I was in the bedroom (as usual) I had plenty to play with, +l my make-up brushes to my knicker drawer – once I started to scratch the surface it was clear there was plenty around me to calculate.
Of course, you can cross-pollenate these tasks if you run short of answers. Using the counting game to find items then using the sensory challenge to think about their properties is a good example of this.
This is a waste of time, surely?
I get that these challenges seem childish, like a pointless passtime that you gain nothing from. It’s an understandable assumption, but it doesn’t address the point. The fact is, when your mind is reeling through such a high level of worry, it’s nigh-on impossible to apply yourself to something complicated, which is why my own creative juices have been failing throughout the last few weeks. Sometimes the BEST distractions are the silliest, simplest, pointless tasks, and the lady on the helpline was brilliant at reminding me of this.
But I have to stress, these solutions won’t solve the underlying problem. It’s a distraction for a reason – the stress you’re managing will likely still be there afterwards. So, I’ll be honest, as that evening and the following days wore on, so did my relentless headache and unstoppable anxiety and until our daughter is back to full health, I have to expect more of the same.
But in just twenty minutes a stranger didn’t just listen to my anxiety as it poured out of me, she gave me the tools to try and manage if and when it happened again, which it did a few days later.
This is the first post from the heart that I’ve written for weeks, which shows how long it can take to get your mojo back. And I’m still not fully there. But in the meantime at least I have some new stress-busters to try and distract myself when I feel panic starting to take over.
If you are looking for your own distractions then I have 2 pages on this site that might help. As I mentioned before, my Creative Coping Strategies campaign is all about finding a consuming distraction that you can use forever if you need to. It’s about finding a creative passion that you enjoy that you can have ready to use whenever you feel it’s needed. For shorter term quick-fixes (similar to the ideas I’ve mentioned above) my stress hacks page has some ideas to try which, if nothing else, will keep you busy for a short period as you go through the list to find something that works.
It’s ok to need a distraction, it’s ok to feel a level of worry that’s hard to control. It’s something everyone feels from time to time. Saying that, most importantly, whatever the reason for your mental health decline, it’s critical that you get professional help with managing it long-term, especially when the problem is affecting your quality of life. Lots of helpline numbers are available on my Get Support page.
The Picture
I chose this picture because, at the time when this was all unfolding, the subject matter was the biggest distraction of all.
Our dog is wonderful, and I like to believe she knows when something isn’t right at home. That evening, as I sobbed on the phone to a stranger and shook with worry over our daughter, this pooch was steadfastly by my side and provided me with another tactile sensory ‘object’ to scrutinise…until she started snoring.
Thanks for reading 💜💜🐶
Creative Steph 