Make Good Art

Does this picture really need a caption?

It's been a bad year...

Let me fess up:  I'm in a bad place, and I'm not handling it well.  2016 can officially get to fuck, for so many reasons, and while therapy is going well, it's a regular slot at the start of the week during which my anxieties are poked and prodded.  Current massive crisis detailed below.

This post is pretty much a list of what's going on at the moment for me, and how much of a mess I'm getting myself into.  Also, some vague and misapplied wisdom from Neil Gaiman.  Ready?


I've been down in a hole since half term.  It's bad.  All symptoms go.  I've got Powerpoints, spreadsheets, Flickr activity, self-imposed sleep deprivation, and massive anxiety about work and family.  Therapy, like I say, is great, but starts most weeks with some serious processing.

Take last Monday's effort.  Over the weekend, I started feeling hugely anxious.  The US election results felt like Brexit all over again.  I'm horrified and frightened, although it did galvanise me into some positive action with my students around Armistice Day, when I led my class in a 2-minute silence that was humbling, respectful and moving.  Kids who've fled their own warzones to come to my country stood up to share its remembrance.  I made that happen.  That feels good.

But then over the weekend, the anxiety kicked in.  It felt like this time last year.  Hyperventilation, headaches, panic.  Not good feelings.  I took this to my therapist and talked about the possible reasons for this coming back, and we talked about Trump and Leonard Cohen's death.  However, it turns out that over the weekend, when the anxiety started to bite, something else happened.  Something that didn't register as a source of anxiety with me.  My father was in hospital overnight having had 8 seizures in quick succession.  It's bad.  He's okay now, but this was going on in my life, causing me all this anxiety, and I didn't even think about it.  It was filed away and ignored, like everything else with my father, and on Monday morning I looked at my blindspot and found it all there.  That's been hard to deal with this week.

Other things, work is hard, my students are all over the place, and I'm having meetings this week with managers to try and sort everything out.  I'm in a much better place than last year, but it's still incredibly difficult to go to these meetings and explain why I'm not on top of things in the way I should be.  So, what do I do in these situations?  Powerpoints, spreadsheets, Flickr activity...

I made this video.  It took me a while, but I think it's actually pretty good.  It's getting positivity from people on Flickr who are similarly inclined.  See what you think:

And then a video from Neil Gaiman pops up, (this one) talking about the times when bad things happen to you, and you're feeling like shit.  These are the times, according to him, that you should make good art.  You should take your experiences and work through them.  It's a good video, and it reminded me to get back to my fiction-writing.  I'm nearly at the end of first draft, which is something.

The White Queen and
Her Ladies in Waiting.
1 of 14 White Queens that I've
scripted (so far) for my little
dice game

So, here I am, blogging away when I should be doing something about my meeting tomorrow, spammed with painkillers because of my teeth, which are being dealt with on Friday, which only hurt when I smoke, which I've sort of taken up again in secret, which is massively irresponsible, makes me feel like shit and causes me to feel ill during my evening classes and do a bad job for my students in the daytime who are working through a range of personal problems that I need to keep on top of, instead of making videos, writing fiction and coding a spreadsheet game in which women in wedding dresses lead three other women in domination, humiliation and punishment.

So yes, I'm in a bad place and I'm in self-destruct mode.  I hope you like my video.

LMW