Giving It All Space and Time

I've been taking mini-breaks from social media this past month, just a few days of total avoidance at a time here and there, or staying off of specific platforms, perhaps loitering on others. Often recently I've felt like closing down all my accounts on every platform (let's see...counting this blog that would make ten different platforms and accounts, with eight of them active). Each platform generates its own particular noise, and all of them together turn into a dull roar of advertisements, self-promotion, awful awful news, tons of propaganda, and other annoyances. Every day I think how much my mental health might improve if I ditched every one of them and communicated solely by carrier pigeon. But still.

I stay. I gawk. I scroll. For the baby-puppy-cat pics. For friends' and family members' funny, brilliant, heartwarming, and heartbreaking stories. For news of writing friends' successes and calls for submissions. For news of friends. For news of former students and their incredibly interesting lives. For cheeky, irreverent memes. For the short videos that give me ideas for art projects. And for the cancer news, a mixture of grim loss and tremendous hope.

This month, for me the news is good, as recent scans showed continued disease stability. And that is no small thing, but an enormous and undeserved gift. So if my story brings someone else some hope, as others' stories have done for me, then that's a good enough reason to keep writing and to stay connected in online forums. When I got involved in cancer social media, I did so looking for hope, and I found lots of it in blogs, Facebook support groups, and on Twitter mostly. But I've also read so many posts by people who are dying, or by people who are caring for people who are dying. Some days, I just close my laptop or delete apps from my phone and say "Enough!" 

I've had some conversations recently with other writers and artists about the grief any of us carries (not just cancer patients, but all who have experienced profound loss and trauma again and again) and how that does or does not inform or affect creative work. Some talked about how healing creative work can be, especially if it's outside the marketplace (not for pay or sale), though compensation is nice too. The challenge for many, though, was giving it all space and time. Sometimes grief and the air we breathe feel like the same thing, and all we want to do is get away from it, whatever that takes. But sometimes leaning into grief, trauma, despair, and sitting with it, and responding to it with art, poetry, stories, cookery, any affirming creative act—just making something, anything in response—honors that grief, and maybe quiets it or us for just a bit.

And so, over the past couple of months, I signed up for some art classes. And it's helped. I'm focusing mostly on my old friend paper-craft, doing collage and marbling. But I'm also doing a six week class that deals more with process and play (I mean like serious Montessori school type play) rather than technical aspects of art making. I don't know that I'm becoming a better artist so much as I am becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, with intuitive seeking in that uncertainty, and maybe that's a start. I'm trying to give it all time and space. 

And I'm sharing pics here and on IG and FB.