This year, my husband bought me a shirt for Christmas that says “I came. I saw. I had anxiety, so I left.” Needless to say, I am a person with a lot of anxiety, like A LOT. I worry about big things and little things, and things that happened a long time ago, and things that may never ever happen. I know I’m not alone in the worry soup that is the anxious brain.

So, what do we do?

Well, I make things. So many things. I make good things that I call “hangupable art”, the stuff I put on my wall or sell, and I make an even higher volume of really terrible art that will never be seen by human eyeballs. (I don’t really even show those things to my dog because she is a precious angel who deserves only the best in life.).

But even my bad art has a purpose because I get so much relief in my brain from the making of things, all of the things.



I love seeing colors mix and blend. I love it when something unexpected happens. I love it when I make myself laugh. I love it when one idea leads to another and then another. Mostly I love the break my brain gets when I’m creating and not thinking about all of my worries. When I’m making something, that’s all my brain can focus on.

But here’s the deal, I know that lots of people find the idea of making art super stressful. In fact, I did a video recently where I showed one of my favorite art processes for calming my brain where I put watercolor on the page, let it dry, and then just outline all of the different shapes that I see. I didn’t draw anything. I just followed the lines of the paint with pen. I find it to be very meditative. And some of the comments I kept seeing were “this would stress me out” and “I’d have anxiety because I’d mess it up.” Those types of comments come from fear. The fear of making something and doing it “wrong”, and fear of putting something into the world and having someone else tell them it’s not good.

But if you can change your mindset to focus on the colors and the lines, and the way the paper feels under your pen, you begin to realize that the joy is not in what you’re making, but in the making itself. If you can tell yourself that it doesn’t matter what it looks like when it’s done, you can be in the moment.

I know that most people who don’t consider themselves artistic don’t know where to start, and beginning something new can seem too hard, especially if you’re already in a state of panic over something dumb you said to a complete stranger eight years ago. And even for me, a “professional” artist, there are still times when I find it difficult to make my way to the art room, times when it’s hard to pull myself out of my own head. And you know what? That’s also when I need art the most.

So when it’s difficult for me to begin making art, I have a couple strategies:

• I’ll pick up a brush and start applying watercolor to the paper, not trying to paint anything, just putting paint to paper. From there I usually get focused on something that will keep me painting. Or I grab pens or crayons or colored pencils, and start making marks. I find color to be very calming, so I usually just focus on putting colors together that make me happy.
  
  
• When I can’t even bring myself to do that, I find a class or a tutorial online, because sometimes I just want to be told what to paint. Tell me the steps. Let me simply follow directions because my mind is incapable of original thought. These are all solutions to my ultimate problem, which is how to break my mind out of whatever loop it’s stuck in, and they all work for me. 

Behind all of the hang-upable art that you see out in the world is a lot of not so pretty, not so polished, not so perfect work. And a lot of that bad art serves an even greater purpose than the art that is considered good.

If you can get into the habit of telling yourself that you’re making art for you and no one else, you can eliminate the need for perfection, and your art can be whatever you need it to be. Because ultimately, it’s not important what you make, it’s how you feel when you’re making it.