December 2020
Travel-In: Mental Health and Reflection

So it’s the end of another year in my creative journey, and What A Year It Has Been. Sometimes all I can do is just shake my head at it. I’ll open my mouth to try and form words, and then close my mouth again, hit Repeat for Minutes on End, because, just, Holy Fuck. You know? I think if I could sum this whole year up in a phrase, it would be “I don’t fucking know?”

Maybe it’s just me, but never before have I felt more lost or more alone and lonely than during the past 12 (maybe 14) months — and yet, never before have I had to depend more on my self, on my own perspective, on my own strengths, on my values, on my philosophy, on the lessons I have learned along the way. Never before have I felt more shredded to pieces, more torn in half and in quarters, more divided between my thoughts and my feelings and the world around me. I don’t even feel like I’m being overly dramatic when I say that. I feel like I’m being underly-dramatic. Like, I’m being polite by not shouting in all caps THIS YEAR NEARLY DESTROYED ME. I may look in tact but I feel like that character in the movie crawling across the ground after an explosion, hands and arms and face all bloodied and an AK-15 pointed at my head like “WHAT NOW?!”

The memories I have from this year are brutal. Like, I have this one memory in my head of my Mom and I in a screaming match one time after I moved her down to Austin, I think we were “talking” to my brother about the monthly care-giving allowance or one of those other #deathconversations, and my mom, in one of her most lucid and thoughtful moments, screamed at me that I am bipolar and I screamed back that, no, I just had an ANXIETY DISORDER and she was causing me SEVERE ANXIETY and that was … probably one of the last lucid moments we had together because cancer is such a fucking bitch-dick (I don’t want to give it a gender but it has a lot in common with Mitch McConnell).

I’m not a mental health expert, not at all. But my mom was bipolar. She took medicine when I was growing up but I could never really tell what it actually did to her or for her. But you know. We always carry our parents with us, in ways we take forever to understand. I know this year a lot of us were hit with the worst of our selves, and we had to sit there alone with them for much longer than maybe we wanted to. But every thing that has a good side has a bad side. Every mountain has a valley. Every light needs darkness. This year has been a curse and a blessing. For me, there is no line between the mania and the depression. Yes, they may come in large waves. But they are not two extremes but one mountain top. They are not two rivers but one ocean tide. There is not day and night, there is just this rotating planet in a universe of space and sun, of atoms and dark matter. Or at least, that’s how they feel right now, in this moment. They don’t feel separable. They are both difficult to walk away from. They are both an uncontrolled journey down a rabbit hole where thought and self dance and collide and love and explode each other to smithereens.

But if this year has shown me anything, it’s why creativity is just so important — why it’s just so important to flex and strengthen your creative muscles and your creative self as much as you can, because creativity is a strength of the conscious and of consciousness. Prioritizing creativity in your life is as essential to your well-being, health and life journey as cardio is to your physical health. Creativity is how we make sense of our experiences, how we share them with others, the story we tell ourselves, our contributions to the collective perception of humanity. And we all have it. We were all born with it, the same we were given the ability to breathe. Cheetahs run fast, birds can fly and human beings can create.

One of the hardest things about this year was the feeling of being so stuck in one place all the time, not being able to really plan for the future because I’d never know how I would feel on any given day, what the world would be like from week to week, what thing on the news would just totally make me lose my shit for three days straight (while still having to be a functional working adult). I managed to get out of town once or twice — the beach both times — but for the most part 2020 really required a lot of imagination, a lot of travelling-in more than out. There was a lot more time exploring the Best of Indie Folk Music Videos on the Internet and the thoughts and ideas in my head than there was even thinking about exploring Paris, because Paris and most of the world was an automatic no-go. I was pushed to re-explore the same places over and over and over again, only on different days with different rays of light and different clouds passing through the sky. And the truth is, no matter how stuck we think we are: We are all always traveling somewhere, if not physically, then mentally or emotionally. It may not be by leaps and bounds or by airplanes and trains. It may be thought by thought or step by step or just a drifting through time like it's the wind. It may be inward instead of outward. It may be looking into the micro instead of the macro. But we travel all the same. Some places are darker than the night sky, but they force you to dream the stars into existence just so you can see the power in your own hands again. Some places shed a lot of tears but those tears somehow provide the ingredient for chasing rainbows in the storm. Some thoughts you wish you had never had and they haunt you like ghosts who refuse to pass, whispering things that can’t be repeated and stalking you at night but they are the only reason you appreciate the sun so much for what it is and every other passing moment for what they are not.

This is life at a crossroads. There is uncertainty all around and decisions to make and goals to set and dreams to push into reality and loves and heartbreaks waiting in the rearview. This is the start of another new year. What are we going to do with it?