Essay Collection: First Person Musings and Thoughts
On depression, creativity, writing, education, personal growth, grief, the stuff of life
I write about many different aspects of where art meets psychology here at Create Me Free. On this page, you’ll find my first person essays and musings. This is the personal stuff that’s all about my own lived experience as a full time writer-artist who lives with double depression.
On Depression
Is the Depression Spectrum Really More Of a Circle? Or a Spiral? Or a Keyboard? Adjusting my framework as it relates to my lived experience and the relationship of mental health to creativity with a focus on understanding “double depression.”
Depression: A Black Dog? An Elephant? A rider on the bus I navigate through life. Why this metaphor makes sense and why it changed from a Lyft passenger to a bus rider.
Creativity And Health Have a Conversation. If I could sit them both in a chair and listen in on their conversation, I would be interested in knowing: Hey Creativity, how do you feel about Health? What are your highest goals and dreams and ambitions and how does health affect those? What are your biggest fears and how does Health help or hinder them? Hey Health, what does Creativity do to you? When Creativity is powerful, how does that impact you? What do you look like when you are your best self and how does Creativity affect that?
On Grief
Semi; Colon: A Grief Tattoo Story. Processing my father’s death ten months in - the tattoo that I got when he died, the story of intergenerational suicidality.
Audio Post: It is eighteen months later and the numb disbelief that I thought had faded into acceptance has transmuted into a roiling mess of confused thoughts and feelings that are so disconnected from the five stages of grief that I don’t know how to describe them. I don’t have words. And yet, I share words.
Dad’s Writing. Snippets from his journals which have helped me in the grief process.
Looking Back at the Past
Rediscovering My Old Double Exposure Photos of Georgia O'Keeffe: Producing memories of a creative self I hadn’t known had faded. ... "It’s really tough to describe what happened but if I were a Russian nesting doll, the big head was popped off to reveal that there was a same-but-different little me inside ...”
I Live Here: SF: Revisiting a project on San Francisco and reflecting on personal change. Many of the things I thought or said or believed or wrote back then are still true but perhaps I just have a different perspective because the city has changed and the world has changed and I have changed.
Musings and Memories on Art, Education, and Mental Health at 43, 33, 23: Reflecting on my life journey through creativity and mental health, returning to education at 23, 33, 43.
Gestalt Experience. I had a lot of ideas about what the Gestalt intensive was going to be like for me. I was right about some and wrong about others. Here, I look back at what I took away.
Aging Well… Yes, Life Chose Me After All. A look at the growth of my life and creativity through the lens of Dar Williams’ music and three letters written from me to me.
Back in 2012, I had just self-published Crochet Saved My Life and put a lot of effort into trying to promote the book. I did this through many means but mostly through connecting with others who were willing to share excerpts, interviews, etc. with their own readers. Today, I wanted to share with you one of those old interviews, originally published (and still available online) by Sylvia Browder.
Here’s what I wish for when I blow the candles out on the birthday cake this year (which will probably be chocolate mousse and not a cake, although I do love a good carrot cake)
Writing About My Writing and Creative Process
From Autopilot to Authenticity: Slowing Down to Find My Voice: Reclaiming my voice from algorithmic writing. We know things. Then we forget. Then we remember. Now I remember.
On Turning Outside When Perhaps I Need to Turn Inward. I love knowledge, I love information, I love doing deep dives into random topics that happen to catch my fancy. When I want to learn something, I devour sources about it. I love to curate bodies of information and distill them down into my own writing. Nothing wrong with that - it's a thing about myself I know is true and celebrate. But it's also true that I don't always trust my own instincts or the power of my own knowledge.
Adding and Subtracting, Writing and Sculpture: How my creative career has evolved from addition to editing. In writing, you begin with a blank page. It is entirely empty and you add to it and add to it until you have your work of art. In crochet, it’s similar, in that you start with only a line of yarn and add one loop onto another until you have fabric, a blanket, a sweater. Sculpture often takes the opposite approach. You start with a block of everything that you need already there and you chip away at it until you find the art.
La vita della scrittrice, life of a writer. Not being a machine, I seem to require time and inspiration and energy and relationships and pauses and ebbs and flows and swells and emotions and changes ...
Thoughts on Letting Go, Releasing, and the Importance That I Stop "Shoulding" On Myself: Learning to let go of my own high expectations for myself, my own self-judgment and self-criticism, my own sense of internal obligation has been one of the most difficult parts of my creative process.
On Listening. I've had to learn to quiet the deluge, silence the automatic responses, and listen to the rest. Listen to my body. Listen to my feelings. Listen to the words only along with the rest of me.
Wellness and Creativity: A Cycle of Personal and Collective Flourishing. I focus on holistic wellness as an evolving practice, making it a priority to regularly reassess my well-being in mind, body, and spirit. My work explores how wellness and creativity intersect, aiming to support individuals and communities by sharing insights, fostering connection, and building a resource library through collaboration and research.
Tips and Encouragement for Writer-Artists
Tip: Create a "Brag Book" To Keep You Inspired When You're Losing Your Way: Staying motivated in a creative career. It's easy to get lost when looking forward, trying to plan a creative career; remember to look back sometimes and learn from yourself. You already know a lot!! Tips and excerpt examples from one section of my own brag book.
Honoring Your Inner Artist: We all create. We do it in ways big and small every single day, intentionally and unintentionally. Essay on the importance of owning one’s creativity for personal and societal healing.
The Semi-Lost Art of Letter Writing: Community means a lot of different things. But basically, we are all human and we need to feel connected to other humans. It's not just that we need humans around us. Many of us have been in a crowd and felt entirely alone. And social anxiety is a real thing. It's that we need humans - whether many or just a couple close ones - who see us, know us, hold our hands and our hearts, really connect with us. Writing letters and newsletters in community can create this connection.
Nine ways that mental health symptoms impact the creative process via heightened self-awareness, each with self-care tips and an exercise to integrate these insights into your creative practice.
Mental Health Reasons I May Not Read Your Writing ... and Please Write It Anyway: Encouragement for writers to keep going despite feedback concerns, subscriber counts, impostor syndrome. This is one of my most popular pieces. If you ever get upset by a lack of likes, follows, opens, readers, subscribers, this one is for you.
And Various Other Essays
What Makes Art Help Sometimes And Sometimes Not. Trigger stacking, decision fatigue, the window of tolerance and other factors that have made art not help me at certain times ...
Designing A Library Where Art Meets Psychology. I don't know where I would draw a distinction if making a library where art meets psychology. I know a lot of specific themes that interest me ... like how artists across history have coped with mental health diagnosis and how their specific cultures related to that, how mental health challenges themselves have been depicted in art throughout history, how art therapy works and when it doesn't and why, the art and music made by people known to be coping with mental health struggles. I don’t know what this library would look like in physical form. But Create Me Free is a small snippet of the digital form of this library.
Handwriting, Hypergraphia, Hypographia, Creativity, and Mental Health: Hypergraphia is an official term and a medical diagnosis. Hypographia is a term I made up to describe the opposite. When I researched “the opposite of hypergraphia,” I came up with agraphia, writing impairment, and writer’s block. We’ll also cover dysgraphia, which is physical difficulty with writing.
Let Simone Biles Inspire Us to Normalize Taking Mental Health Breaks. It's actually not normal to just push and push and go and go and never rest enough to allow your body and mind and feelings and relationships and creativity and wellness to thrive.
Anxiety and Conflict on Project Runway. A look at a quick scene that a lot of people may have not even paid much attention to, but it really captured my attention. It feels like so much to unpack there.
Excerpt from Internet Addiction Book. Back in the early days of social media, including the beginning of Facebook, the purpose – and the reason that people spent time on the device – was to connect with other people that they already knew in real life. People spent time on the site as a novelty, because it was fun and somewhat social, but it didn’t dominate their attention. Over the years, Facebook has added countless tools designed to exploit the brain’s addictive nature.
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