Creativity as Therapy
When my Postpartum Depression and Anxiety were at their height and my mind felt trapped in a revolving door of “morbid introspection,” my therapist encouraged me to turn to creative outlets for an escape. There’s definitely wisdom in that advice, especially as it relates to Postpartum Anxiety, in which the left side of the brain is obsessively trying to analyze and make sense of inherently illogical and irrational ideas. It’s a fruitless endeavor, but the anxious mind will never stop ruminating if it thinks it will gain even a modicum of peace this way (it won’t).
By engaging the right side of your brain – the creative side – you can theoretically regain a more balanced thought pattern that can break the cycle of endless analysis. I was staying at home with our new baby and I had literally nothing to do all day except care for her and worry about all the ways the world was seemingly falling in on me. I needed other things to think about. I needed a reason to come up for air.
I knew a cognitive task would provide the most distraction – something like reading a challenging book or learning a complex skill – and if my depression had been a little less debilitating, I probably would have had the focus and wherewithal to benefit from that. But the degree to which my anxiety had taken hold made any kind of task that required sustained concentration unthinkable. I couldn’t focus on anything but my fears for two minutes together.
Yet I’ve always had a creative bent and can trace the ways my brain has favored its right hemisphere over the years. Whether practicing silly doodles on long car rides; or trying to learn a song on the piano by ear (because I lacked the technical/left brain skills to learn to read music easily); or discovering in college how much I loved looking through the viewfinder of a camera; or my studies in English Literature and academic writing; or my interests now in renovations and home aesthetics.
I’m honestly perhaps right brain dominant to a fault, since I can’t do basic arithmetic to save my life and would probably die of old age on the side of the road if my Google Maps app stopped working. So when my therapist offered this advice, I knew it hit the mark for an ideal therapeutic approach, but I didn’t know which activity I should turn to.
I had to think about it for a bit, but I eventually came upon the idea of something simple like cross-stitch. I hadn’t done cross-stitch since I was a kid, so I would have to “relearn” it in a sense (which was good for distraction purposes). Yet it was rudimentary and non-cognitive enough that my brain could probably handle it during this difficult and distractible time. It was also repetitive and calming, which helped to focus my mind and engage my hands on an easy task while a show played in the background (I also watched a LOT of Netflix during my depression because stories have always been a welcome escape for my literary mind). I attempted to “stitch” my life back together this way for about 5 or so months, and while it wasn’t a cure-all (nothing is, really, except time), I could still see how it was slowly helping my mind to supplant fear with activity, and I was grateful for that.
In fact, cross-stitch might even be a fitting metaphor for the process of mental and emotional recovery more broadly. Every little stitch gets you closer to a finished picture of order and beauty. And recovering from Postpartum mood disorders – or really any emotional upheaval – can be much the same. Healing doesn’t happen all at once (no matter how desperately you wish it would). For many, the progress is so slow and incremental that you feel like you’re walking in place, going nowhere. But that’s just an illusion, because your mind is making little inroads toward healing everyday. So while you may not feel different or better than you did the day before, you can still step back and notice how you aren’t where you were three months ago, or even last year. You’ve been gaining ground on this subtle incline a little bit everyday and didn’t know it. And that’s a mental truth that you have to hold onto when depressed, because the oh-so-believable feeling, the convincing lie, is that you will always feel this way and you will never be the “old you” ever again. Don’t believe it. Because every little stitch I made on my blank piece of cloth was like one day of pushing through and surviving. String enough of them together and you have an image of wholeness in the end.
At this point, three years out, I’ve technically recovered from my bout of depression, but I still throw myself into artistic activities because they help me to feel purposeful and grounded. I believe we are all born with a latent desire to create; to correct or enhance or beautify our surroundings. This may look different for each individual, but the impulse is there. For my husband, who is left brain dominant (a computer-programming-engineer type whose logical bent can put Spock to shame), that could look like getting the cars into perfect mechanical order or satisfyingly organizing his tool collections. Participating, as we do, in the Imago Dei (image of God), these productive drives are a natural extension of our createdness; a way to emulate our Maker and bear His thumbprint on our lives. It reminds us of who we are in relation to Him and the world around us.
And I see my current fixer-upper endeavors in that light in a lot of ways. It’s the creative stage that I’m now in. When I was a student, all my creative energies went toward discovering the beauty of literature and putting its novelties into my own words. Now I’m a stay-at-home mom with a house half in utter disarray and in so much need of aesthetic attention. It’s a welcome and exciting challenge, and I find calming satisfaction in the simplest tasks – from (re)painting a large room, to sanding and refinishing a table top, to arranging a seasonal bouquet of flowers. And I get really excited about the dramatic Befores-and-Afters; when a complete vision comes to life and a room looks drastically different than it did before. In those moments, we make something that wasn’t there before… and it’s beautiful. These things give meaning and life and interest to our lives, even if they seem frivolous in the grand scheme of things. We are mini-creators by design, and I think God smiles down on us as we humbly work to beautify our worlds.
