Guest post: My nervous makedown
On burning out and creating a new path amid the ashes
Hello,
It feels strange to be the one writing that on Katherine’s Substack, as I’m usually behind the scenes, proof-reading, checking weblinks and scheduling posts. I worked as an editor on newspapers for a long time, and while the feeling of reading someone’s work before it gets published and experiencing a tingle of recognition is familiar from those days, I delight in the fact that so many posts on The Clearing fill me with such a powerful zing of rightness. Yes, yes! Labyrinths! Remote islands! The beauty and strain of building strong boundaries! The wonderful realisation that so many of us have different brains and fascinations that fire us up while leaving other people cold.
Today I’m acting as a ‘supply teacher’ while Katherine prepares for the launch of Enchantment in paperback. I don’t know that I’ll be doing any teaching, but I hope that we can learn a bit about each other until the bell goes. I’ll start: my name is Rebecca, I love reading, I have a pet tortoise, I really like sleeping and I don’t watch television because I find it unbelievably stressful. If I’m ever experiencing a deathly lull in conversation, I tell people that I don’t watch TV and then they happily spend the next hour recommending things that I should absolutely watch. It seldom fails.
What else? I used to think that my identity was defined by the job I did, and that I would never want to be anything other than a journalist. I’m creative, and used to think that work was where that happened, and that I didn’t have the brain space, time or energy to do much more than my role demanded. I used to drink, then, a few years ago, I stopped. I found that I had a little bit more brain space, time and energy, and that maybe I should figure out what to do with it. In the summer, when I could claw my way out of work in time, I started swimming in an open-air pool. It was always worth the sticky rush to get there before the evening session closed. Even when the place was so packed with people that the water was reminiscent of soup, I felt my shoulders drop and my heart-rate settle.
Autumn called time on my post-work swims. Scrolling through Instagram, I started to pay more attention to people making things - art, clothes, jewellery - and remembered when I was a teenager and had thought that that might be my path. One evening I saw a post from a weaving studio on the other side of London. It all looked so colourful, with plump worms of yarn and rainbow-hued spools of thread lining the walls. It seemed like a soft, bright nest and all I wanted to do was curl up in it. So I booked a class the following week.
When I turned up, I was so stressed at leaving the office at 6pm and haring across London to be there on time that I felt like a clenched fist. Hot and furious, ready to fight. I looked at the other people who were there. Women, mainly, laughing, chatting, drinking glasses of juice or sparkling wine. How dare they be so relaxed, I thought. Why don’t they shut up? Scowling, I found my seat.
The tutor explained what we’d be making and handed us our small wooden “lap” looms. There were simple instructions and no stringent rules. We chose different wools and started using the ladder of threads to build walls of soft, bright, sparkly joy. I reached for the colours that made me think of swimming. Silver, turquoise, white and blue. In and out, back and forth, doing a different kind of length. I felt as though I’d been there for a few minutes when it was time to stop. I couldn’t believe that more than two hours had passed. It was like waking up from an unexpected but much-needed nap. I was dazed but relaxed, softened and unwound. Was this what being in a state of flow felt like? Why hadn’t the voice in my head, the critic that usually told me to go faster/do better/be perfect/not like that, been in attendance? I didn’t care that my half-finished weaving was wonky. I hadn’t done this before and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t a triumph. The next week, I finished it, threading in some pearls to signify bubbles and hanging it on a knobbly stick. I made that, I thought, and I love it.
*
What do you love doing? What are you good at? It’s taken me a long time to realise that the answers to those questions aren’t necessarily the same. I love sitting still, but I’m not very good at relaxing. I like things to be calm and quiet, but I can achieve a lot under intense pressure and at great speed. For a long time I was good at doing a demanding job while also being a carer to a loved one. I was good at taking on more and I loved hearing people say that they didn’t know how I did it. I was good at running on empty and I was terrible at stopping and looking at reality.
When I was at school, I loved being in the art studio and the library. I loved making things and - as you know - I loved reading. I wasn’t amazing at drawing but increasingly, I was getting really good grades in English. So I ended up choosing words as a way to escape the reality of a rocky home life and as a life raft to get me to university. I packed away the idea of art and, beyond doodling in my notebook or the occasional binge on paint, focused on writing and then editing. Maybe I’d do a foundation course (a year-long, full-time introduction to studying art after high school) when I retired, I thought. For now, my brain was a factory that produced ideas and then processed them into column inches and double-page spreads day after day, week after week, year after year for almost two decades.
Then the machinery broke down. The fuses blew and the electrics burned out. The unique circumstances and repercussions of the pandemic certainly played their part in the industrial action that saw my mind cease operations and start a go-slow campaign. Every decision paralysed me because I was so scared of making mistakes. I was frightened of losing my job, and petrified of having to keep doing it. I was mad with anxiety about a relative in a care home and whether they’d catch Covid and die alone. My body joined the protest, with sky-high blood pressure and near-daily migraines.
I’d known things - caring responsibilities, work - were getting on top of me, but my solution had been to do more. Surely to feel better I had to do better, to work harder? I’d thought I could kick-start my creativity, come up with a side hustle if not a whole new career plan and become more spiritually enlightened at the same time. To that end, I started reading The Artist’s Way and writing morning pages every day, although more often than not they were lunchtime, or even evening pages. I was meditating each morning and doing a daily yoga challenge. And working a 12-step program. As well as doing a pretty punchy job, isolated at home from the company of my colleagues.
What actually happened next was what Katherine and I call my nervous makedown. I was signed off work for three months and told by my doctor - as well as my boss - to slow down, to rest and only return when I was ready. At times I felt I never would be. And if I wasn’t, who on earth was I? Plus, what was I going to do with myself that didn’t involve looking at my laptop for 12 hours a day while frantically refreshing news websites, social-media sites and trying to get my unread emails below 34,000?
I remembered the softness of the weaving, and how I hadn’t cared if I was any good at it. How absorbed I’d been and how relaxed it made me. I decided to see if I could embroider a goose onto a pair of denim shorts. After I’d finished it, I did a green dinosaur. Then a kingfisher. I didn’t follow any patterns, I just watched some simple videos on how to do different stitches. I noodled around with a holey jumper and worked out how to darn. I went to stay by the sea at a friend’s house and collected shells. I turned some of them into tiny sculptures and when I was feeling particularly anxious, I would sit on the beach and draw the pebbles. It didn’t matter if the pebbles looked rubbish. It didn’t matter that normal people were sitting on the beach next to me, doing normal things, while I felt like a sculpture made out of coathangers and lard that was controlled by the rats that lived in my head. I just kept drawing my pebbles until they filled the page.
I made a dress from a pattern for the first time. I had a second-hand sewing machine and YouTube tutorials - how hard could it be? I spent hours with my eyes glued to the presser foot, following it as though it was the northern star. I was totally absorbed in doing the next thing the instructions told me to. Then I made another dress. And another. Unable to totally kick the top-down productivity habit, I signed up to an online course to improve the way I used a sketchbook. I quickly ducked out of it, as I felt my perfectionism rearing its head. I was given what was to be the first of many unfinished patchwork quilts, and slowly started learning how to do English Paper Piecing, using a small book that was published the year that I was born. Today my impromptu patchwork orphanage is thriving, although I haven’t completed a single quilt.
I tried lino printing. I didn’t discover a latent talent, nor did I make myself join any month-long Instagram print-prompt challenges to push myself harder. But I did have fun. I painted with ink and with watercolour. None of the things I did was on a to-do list, there was no peril or import waiting when I did or didn’t finish something. Away from daily, hourly deadlines, my jaw stopped feeling quite so locked. I found the right support, including medication, to ease the migraines that had been plaguing me. I began to see that the life I’d been living was inhospitable to the person I’d become. I didn’t know how to make it habitable but I knew that I was incredibly fortunate to have this pocket of time to rest and play.
*
What did you want to be when you grew up? Is it what you do now? When I was small, I wanted to be an artist. Or a writer. Or a fashion designer. I remember a friend from primary school telling a bemused teacher that she wanted to be a curtain. As a teenager my goal for the then-almost-unimaginable future was to do something cool. I knew that being bored was worse than being terrified. Finding the middle ground between those two poles is proving to be a very long-running project.
After a few months of sick leave, I crept back to work, building up my days but continuing to sew, draw and create like my life depended on it. My sanity certainly did. I didn’t make anything prize-winning. I didn’t paint anything so beautiful that people were clamouring to buy it. I made a pair of pyjama trousers. I didn’t start a business making pyjama trousers. But slowly I built up a portfolio of work and an idea of myself that wasn’t solely based on my job. I did some life-drawing classes. Being in the studio felt like coming home. I remained unamazing at drawing, but it became more of a tool rather than an end in itself. I grew more confident that I had lots of ideas and that some of them were worth bringing to life. I thought that waiting until I retired to study art full-time might make me a hostage to fortune. And I got braver. Or at least, more scared of not making a change than I was of making one.
I didn’t seriously think I’d be a student when I grew up, but here I am, aged 43, back in the lecture theatre in my second year of studying Fine Art. It took patience, planning and a few leaps of faith to get there. It’s a balancing act of loans and throwing my savings to the wind, plus the part-time work I do here. It’s brilliant and it’s full on. It’s not a solid career plan or a guaranteed money-spinner. My inner critic is rising to the challenge of telling me that the world doesn’t need more middle-aged, middle-class white women making art while also insisting that I should have done this years ago. She works hard, that critic, but she doesn’t half contradict herself. The best way to ignore her is to get so absorbed in something, so excited and engaged that there’s no chance she can catch my attention. To sketch without second-guessing my ability and to sew because there’s something I need to fashion. I don’t really know what kind of art I specialise in yet, and I try to see that as exciting and expansive. I like making weird stuff and I like trying new things.
What do you like doing? What do you make? What would your Plan B be? I’d love to know.
Thank you for reading - I hope be writing more about my adventures in art here (this post kicks things off). And don’t worry - normal Katherine service will resume on Sunday.
Rebecca
Coming up at The Clearing for paid subscribers
Elissa Altman and Katherine will be tackling your Creative Questions on Monday 18th March at 6pm.
As you may already know, Katherine also runs a Retreat Tier for people who’d like to take part in four online retreats per year. These three-hour sessions are slow, calm, nourishing moments for us to gather together, shut out the world, and rest. They include some gentle reflective exercises, but the deepest value lies in the discussion that comes up as we meander our way through the session. It’s all about being in community for a while.
The next Retreat is happening on Saturday 24th February. To join us, you’ll need to upgrade to the Retreat Tier.
Saturday 24th February, 4pm - 7pm UK / 11am - 2pm ET / 8am - 11am PT
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I love this essay and I’m so excited for Artnest!
Oh my god, every word of this essay rang so clear and true to me. I was that person (also an editor, as well as being a single parent), always coping, always managing - until a brain tumour stopped me in my tracks. It was removed but that was just the start of my problems. About 20 months later, I’m just dipping my toe in the world of work again, but I feel very different. I have memory problems, I get very tired, I’m extremely depressed. I’ve found knitting to be such a wonderful escape- from my perfectionism, my need for everyone else’s approval. I find I can forgive myself for my knitting mistakes when I can’t in any other area of my life. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, and that scares me s*******. How will I ever be able to work enough to pay my mortgage? But at least I’ve knitted 3 little frogs. And some fingerless gloves. And some breasts (for women who have had mastectomies). And I’ve got a huge, Harry Styles-style patchwork cardigan on the go. Knitting allows me to push my fear to one side and just focus on what I’m doing at that moment.