JANUARY 2022 | ARTIST’S JOURNAL

2020 Was About Survival. 2021 Was About Healing.

In 2022, it’s time to get moving.

By Mighty.Beautiful

It’s a new year again! The old one is history, just like that. With another pandemic surge comes some extra time to reflect on where we are all coming from and where we are all heading, both individually and collectively.

The world, it seems, is always at a crossroads. The more things seem to change, the more they also seem to stay the same. Our problems persist. Our solutions are distant. I can’t really remember the last time I read good news. We lost Betty White and Bob Saget, two people who dedicated their lives to making other people laugh. We are still in a pandemic. Everyone is sick, or recovering from being sick, or is about to be sick. The climate is still in a crisis. Rents are skyrocketing around here, but people are still quitting their jobs en masse, mostly, it seems, out of sheer exhaustion and the belief that there must be something better out there, if only we had the time to find it. Burnout is spreading across America like a wildfire. It seems like it’s the word of the hour, burn out. Why does it exist? What is keeping us from going where we want to go? The present is a tug of war between the past and the future.

It always seems like the world is too large. The problems are too large. The structure is too large. The system is too large. The frustration is too large. The exhaustion is too large. But the size of these things is an illusion, it’s a story we tell ourselves in order to stay okay, in order to keep calm and carry on like the world tells us we must do. It’s an excuse. Because the truth is, the macro and the micro are connected, in every way. The smallest changes that we make in ourselves, to our own lives, day by day and dollar by dollar, are the changes that build the bigger picture. The more frustrated we get individually, the more we feel it collectively, the more we are spurred toward taking action. Every little bit really does count.

Reaching 40 this last year, saying goodbye to my mom, recovering from a deep depression and spending so much time alone while trying to stay healthy are circumstances that have all kind of mixed together this New Years in a kind of existential stew of meaning, purpose and mid-life crisis. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how creativity ties into my spirituality, the ways I use it to connect with memories, with ideas, with people who are far away or gone, and even more time thinking about what horrible place I’d be in today if I hadn’t had such a strong connection with my creative self when the world imploded two years ago. I am certain that I would be dead.

I know I am not the only one who has struggled with mania, depression, anxiety or suicidal ideation. I know many people who struggle with drug abuse and addiction, with constant fatigue, with a lack of focus, with apathy and, as one of my friends calls it, “general malaise.” It’s easy to turn toward medications and narcotics for a little high, or a little sedation, to escape and to forget. Perhaps it is easier to live life in a fog than it is to live in the moment with so many thoughts and fears and just all the weights of living swirling around us and in us. But I honestly believe that the vast majority of what we call “mental illness” in this country is actually something else - a societal illness caused by placing profits before the health and wellness of people; a spiritual illness caused by the de-prioritization of our creative selves as we follow our rabbit holes to ready-made answers and fill our time with screens and games and shows and every other form of passive entertainment so readily available to us in the 21st century. Why train your brain to think creatively when you can keep your brain from having to think at all? Why make something when you can just watch something? I hear people say all the time that they are "not creative" or "don't have the time" for hobbies that they love, and I really, truly, believe that neither of those things are true and that those beliefs hurt us all.

We focus so much on our physical health. We’re told to exercise, we’re told to eat well, we’re told to go to the doctor for an annual checkup. We have WebMD at our fingertips and the CDC giving us daily updates on how to stay alive. And we focus so much on our mental health, too, with therapy appointments and affirmations and and antidepressants and anxiety medications and smart phone apps designed to sooth our minds. But I firmly believe creativity is the spiritual muscle that connects our body to our soul, and our spiritual health, our creative health, has kind of gone to shit the last few decades. We live in a world of immediate payoffs and a race for profits, where a desire to take and want more and more and more trumps all, but creativity takes time, often costs money and requires giving over parts of yourself to an ethereal force. Just having faith in God or a Higher Power can seem highly polarized and politicized, thanks to conservative attacks on science, women’s rights, the poor, healthcare and basic truth-telling. Arts funding in many schools is non-existent; we call anything having to do with creativity an “extracurricular” and treat it like it’s not absolutely fundamental. Day by day, we are forced to flow in a world structured for corporate interests rather than personal and collective passion. And it’s all causing an existential happiness crisis. We are lacking in meaning. We are lacking in purpose. We are lacking in hope. We have come to accept the things we must change instead of changing the things we cannot accept. Thanks to pollution, greed, single-use plastics, consumerism, unsustainable diets and other factors, we are heading toward civilizational collapse in less than three decades — and the tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires and global pandemics are all happening so frequently now they’ve become almost invisible.

When the world is darkest is when people need our creative and spiritual selves the most, but I’m afraid that many people believe their creative and spiritual selves are lost, traumatized or long forgotten. In truth, many of us have merely imprisoned the most important parts of our selves to function and succeed in a world where we are driven to climb on top of each other to reach the top. Our creative selves are asleep, hibernating and frail from lack of use — but it’s not impossible to get them back, to awaken the spirit and rediscover the creative force within us. It just requires some stretching, some exercising, some scene-setting, some self-love and some self-care. It requires daily routines and self-reflection. It requires self-kindness and the willingness to be a life-long beginner, since, unlike physical and mental health, creative health doesn’t peak - it’s not a minute-by-minute measure of wellness, but a sum that adds up over time. It always takes a lifetime to fulfill one’s creative potential.

Mental health and creativity advocacy has become really important to me, and I want to do everything I can to encourage other people to honor and connect with their creative selves in this coming year. So my resolution this year ISN’T to have my most creative year yet. It’s to have my most intentional year yet — to finally finish the projects I’ve started in the past, to focus my attention on improving or changing the things I am passionate about, on taking the actions necessary to make the difference I want to make in my own life and in the world.