Anxiety and Conflict on Project Runway: When People's Wounds Rub Against One Another

We are all creative people with mental health. And that is complicated.

In the 2021 season of Project Runway, there was controversy over a contestant named Meg who left after the first few episodes. The controversy made me think about a phrase a teacher once shared: "when my wounds rub up against your wounds.” TV and the Internet make it so easy to judge others based on such little information but the truth is always so much more complicated.

I love the creativity-based reality tv competition shows and Project Runway is the one I've watched the longest of them all. And I often find fascinating the way that mental health shows up in these. In that ‘21 season, in episode one, the designer Meg is looking at photos in her room while two other competitors meditate and Meg starts to cry. She shares that she just really misses her mom, who passed away two years ago. Then she goes on to say that she's struggled with anxiety and mental health challenges since she was a teenager and her mom was always the one who was there to believe in her in spite of that. She continues that she had no idea that the competition would be so hard for her emotionally, just on the second day.

And although this was a really quick scene that a lot of people may have not even paid much attention to, this scene really captured my attention. It feels like so much to unpack there.

First, I know that we have a long way to go when it comes to destigmatizing mental health issues. In particular, there's still a lot of stigma around particular conditions (schizophrenia, for example) as well as mental health among specific populations of people. However, anxiety IS a mental health issue, and it's talked about so easily on shows like Project Runway these days. And I'm glad. It's not enough but that doesn't mean it's not important. Things have shifted even though sometimes it feels like they haven’t.

Second, there are so many of these competition shows, and I can't even begin to imagine the pressure that the contestants are under. With shows like Project Runway or RuPaul's Drag Race, you go there and put all of your creative self on display, share your artistic brand with a huge audience, and you're there doing so under super intense conditions. Now I'm not behind the scenes and I can't say what it's really like but the idea of constructing one original garment after another in such quick succession while in a group of new people, getting judged by professionals in the industry as well as the world of social media ... Well, I imagine that's a strain on anyone's mental health.

I used to believe wholeheartedly that I could never participate in a show like that. That just the idea of having to live with people on Project Runway, away from my home and my solitude, would break me. Let alone have to be creative and judged. I'm in a different place these days. When I went to my first grad school intensive, it did break me open, in a good way. I learned that I'm stronger and more resilient and more resourceful than I thought. I couldn't do Project Runway because I can't really sew but in terms of whether or not I could handle it mentally ... I'm not sure but I know it's more likely now than it was ten years ago. It would be hard but it would probably be do-able. It’s that “window of tolerance” thing. My window is bigger these days than it used to be.

Finally, the scene isn't just about anxiety; it's about grief. Grief is so complicated. Mental health isn't just "do you have a diagnosis?" It's really, "how are you doing right now?" We all have good and bad mental health times in our lives. Some people don't ever have it rise to the level of crisis. Some of us live teetering on the edge of crisis a lot of the time. Grief is something we all experience. It's universal as well as an individual experience. It's a process and not a linear one at that. It shows up throughout our lives and interacts with our other mental health challenges and our creativity in myriad ways.

I've known some people who crafted through grief. Many actually. There are quite a few projects born from grief. And I've known some people who couldn't create at all during the thick of their grief. Did the person's mental health status prior to the loss make a difference in whether or not their creativity came out during grief? Did their creative lives before the loss impact whether or not creativity was therapeutic for grief?

Episode one ends and Meg is still there. But then episode two comes. In this episode, Meg got into a blowup with two other contestants about trading models. Except it wasn't really about trading models; it was about issues of race. A lot of other people have written a lot smarter things about how this all played out - and how it all could have been approached differently - so I'll let you explore the Internet for that aspect of the episode. (Here's one summary of the episode.) But I couldn't help but note the mental health aspect.

Meg comes across as extremely defensive from the get go. And because of her affect, as well as having already previously mentioned her struggles with anxiety, what I saw was her anxiety in full effect. She had barriers up, she talked over people, and when the intensity of the conversation got to be too much for her, she ran away. She herself said in the episode that her fight or flight instinct kicked in and she decided to leave the show for her own mental health.

I'm not here to defend her anxiety or the way she presented herself in the particular conversation. I'm here to say that I relate to the way that anxiety can make you not be your best self. You want to convey something but then anxiety has you up on a level ten and you convey it entirely wrong. Your words get mixed up, you get defensive and frustrated, the whole situation seems to escalate ... and until you come back down into your window of tolerance, you just might be too triggered to behave the way that you want to.

Of course, it's our own responsibility, each of us, to take care of ourselves. She seemed to realize from the get go that the stress of being creative in front of cameras in a competition format was going to be too much for her. Opting out of that makes sense. She herself says that it's okay to step away from what might otherwise seem like a good opportunity if it's not good for your mental health. And I agree with that. There are times we need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones but there are also times we need to acknowledge that we need to be in our comfort zones and it's okay to put ourselves there.

Of course, this ended up intersecting with the issue of race, which complicates things. This was what made me think about one person’s wounds rubbing up against another’s. I've never forgotten that since my teacher said it to me in a class over a decade ago. Because it happens all of the time. We have areas of trauma, triggers, blind spots, all of these wounded parts ... and they can come up against things in other people ... and we all have to work through these things together.

Obviously, Project Runway is a television show. We don't know how much is "real" or how much of what happens gets portrayed vs. edited out. As shown, it looks like Meg just walks off, Christian says goodbye to the group for her, and the group is left to deal with their feelings about it themselves. I hope that perhaps it didn't really happen that way. That perhaps Meg could come down from her anxiety and listen to what her impact was on others. (That's another grad school lesson of mine - your intent doesn't always match your impact and it's important to check in with the other person and find out what your impact has been and acknowledge if it doesn't match your intent and work to express your intent in a better way.) I hope that it wasn't just all left unsaid forever, left in that state of anxious fleeing.

But I get it if it was. I'm super conflict avoidant. I've gotten better at hard conversations over time. But when my anxiety gets high, I usually freeze or want to run. I am not my best self in anxiety. And oftentimes I have to get outside of a situation and move back into a comfortable space before I can have a genuine conversation that isn't rooted in fear.

So, on the one hand, we have to hold people up to high standards. It's a time in history when we need to own our actions and words, have tough conversations, and not shy away from admitting our mistakes when it comes to issue of race, gender, etc. On the other hand, we have to remember that nearly all of us have trauma to one degree or another and we usually don't know how other people's mental health is playing in to their reactions. So we can hold each other up to a high standard while also trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. We can do our best not to react from our own wounds and to understand that others around us might be doing just that.

We are all creative people with mental health. And that is complicated.

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