Clare Bowditch - Your Own Kind of Girl

(page 186-187)

I don't know how many times I told Ron that with a brain like mine perhaps I would never get to live out my Jeff Buckley dream. Even the thought of standing on stage made my cheeks go pink and my hands start shaking.
What if I just started smaller? suggested Ron.
What if I just started with something other than music?
Over the course of the last few months, at the suggestion of The Weekes, I'd begun working on small art projects, the kinds of things I used to do as a kid, just as a way of filling in time. I'd been picking flowers and arranging them in vases, pressing them in books, drawing, painting, knitting, playing with clay, planting seeds and writing down my favourite quotes, especially anything that might also double as a metaphor for hope. These were all things i could do without using too much energy, that i could get carried away in, which made time pass. The voice in my head often still told me that the only way I would ever feel better was to hang on to my fears, ruminate over them, stay alert. But as I became better and better at observing the relationship between the stories I was telling myself and the feelings I was experiencing, I began to realise that the opposite was true.
The less I thought about my own existential worries and the larger worries of the world, the more peaceful I felt. Of course, the voice in my head told me that I was being soft, that I wasn't facing up to reality, that I was selfish and self centred.
I practised accepting. That might well be true, I conceded, but for now, for today, the best way forward was to keep dismissing those rumblings with statements like: 'You know what? There might be a day in the future when I get to tackle those things.
Right now, I'm recovering from a nervous breakdown, so I'm just going to craft for a bit? At first, I needed to spell things out clearly like that, as though I was talking to a child-that was how Ron explained it. Okay, I said. In a way, I was learning a language-the language of self-kindness, self-support, naming emotions, finding ways to alchemise them. It might take a while.

Mindless Embroidery