anxiety – Mixy's Art Blog

butterfly overflow (9/52)

Week 9 of this year is made out of the colours of Spring, honoring the sense of Spring as the world comes back to life after her quiet dormant months. And some of last week’s butterflies have flitted across into this week too. I had a big old tidy up after finishing that project and all the left over butterflies have landed here. (I say all of them… a few got away as you’ll see on the next page).

The week fell on the crossover from February to March, so warranted another list. Seems like there’s a reason for a list pretty much every week now. It’s in the background, but it can germinate there. I’ll patiently await the first shoots of development as the month wears on.

Another week, another meme:

When you do what you fear the most you can do anything.

Ok, yeh, I can take that on as a challenge. I’ve crossed some metaphorical bridges lately, and my metaphorical-bridge-crossing skills are notably sharper as a result. I’ve also come to realise I can’t always tell the difference between the pit-of-the-guts anxiety feeling and its close cousin, the visceral buzz of anticipation feeling.

So I’ve actively decided that henceforth, if I’m in any doubt, I’ll assume its the latter.

It is the feeling of butterflies.

Black holes and bewilderment.

I was reminded of this article recently

Food for thought. Illness is illness, wherever it’s located, it’s all real. ‘All in the mind’ is a real place!

The writer, broadcaster, actor, avid twitterer (to name but a handful of labels), Stephen Fry, has spoken at length on this subject. Living with bipolar he does so with the hope of enlightening and openly addressing something that is still treated as shameful, embarrassing, or a weakness.

Ask someone with depression ‘what caused it?’ and you ostracize them, you’re suggesting blame – a thing or an event which can (could, should) be reduced, eliminated, forgotten, overlooked, gotten over. And it must be valid, it must have the appropriate magnitude. Maybe a bereavement or a diagnosis, a catastrophe that outweighs someone else’s definition of manageable.

Chances are there wasn’t a single event that triggered the episode, maybe it was a long grinding line of things added up to a tipping point. Or maybe it came from nowhere and side-swiped them.

Be kind, don’t judge, you don’t know their story.