In my latest video, I shared a little about how creativity helped me through the darkest time of my life. This is why I am writing this blog, making these videos and promoting the healing power of creativity - to help YOU find your creative way, and hopefully make creativity part of your healing process.
This video is pretty exhaustive in it’s explanation, but I thought I’d drop a few extra words here for those who are genuinely interested enough to visit my blog. By the way, thank you for taking the time to stop by.
So this creativity project has been seven years in the making, but at the time, I didn’t realize I was making it. I suppose it’s because I’m the sort of person that when I go through something really hard, the way I ultimately get through it is by promising myself that one day it will make my life better, and hopefully by sharing it I’ll help make other’s lives better, too. I’ll be honest, though, it’s really hard to share these kinds of experiences. I feel excruciatingly vulnerable, but I also believe that allowing ourselves to be vulnerable is one of the most powerful ways to connect with other vulnerable people.
One of the hardest parts of the illness I talk about in my video was that it wasn’t visible to other people. No one could SEE that I was sick. To help those who’ve never experienced any form of mental illness symptoms, I will tell you that experiencing depression or anxiety is just as debilitating as having a broken leg. I was utterly broken. But the problem is that when someone see's a person with a broken leg, they don’t say things like “Come on, man! Suck it up and run!” They don’t say things like “If you just had more faith, you wouldn’t have a broken leg in the first place.” or “There’s no such thing as a broken leg; it’s all in your head.” I’ve heard all three of these statements about mental illness and many more from people who just didn’t understand the reality of it.
Thankfully, I was blessed with a diagnosable reason behind my symptoms—a condition that was proven to exist by tests and medical experiments performed by a truly gifted and inspired physician. Many other people with mental illness don’t have the luxury of finding a concrete explanation for their symptoms like I did, and my heart aches for them.
But this isn’t meant to be a post entirely about depression, anxiety, PTSD, paranoia, etc, I just wanted to make it very clear that I do believe these conditions are real and that they can be completely debilitating. I also believe that they often need to be treated with the right combination of medication and counseling (I’ve benefitted from both), and that’s going to look different for every person.
Finally, while I firmly believe in the healing power of creativity, I know that it is only a supplemental self-therapy to those other vital forms of treatment. More than anything, I just wanted to share my story to 1) give hope to those of you who might presently be hopeless, and 2) to let you know that you are not alone. I feel your pain, my friend, and I think this whole “healing power of creativity” thing might just work for you too.
Lots of love,
Hannie
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