Category: mental health

mental health · Studenting · Thoughts about Stuff

That Time Calligraphy Saved Me

carmenyount1 Comment
Photo from https://traderjoessignart.blogspot.com/ (lots of amazing signwork here!)

When I was an undergraduate getting ready to embark on a year-long writing project about an aspect of Ciceronian legal rhetoric, my advisor suggested somewhat strongly, but very politely, that I get a hobby.

Because it was September, and I was a mess of stress and anxiety.

So I signed up for a calligraphy class at one of the local community colleges. Every Friday morning, I gathered my large paper pad, pens and nibs, pencils, erasers and inks, and left my apartment early in the morning to catch the first of three buses to get to class. Three hours of class and lunch in the cafeteria later, I caught the first of three buses back to school.

I loved it. I loved everything about it, even the bus rides that took me away from campus for a little bit each week. I loved inky fingers and messy lettering practice. I loved the materials and equipment. I loved the history (I went to school at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, home to a pretty well known calligrapher: Lloyd Reynolds. My teachers were a couple of his students, and they were — and continue to be! — very accomplished in their own right).

In some ways, it wasn’t the healthiest activity. I struggled with perfectionism… practicing calligraphy did not help with that. And I was looking for an escape, rather than a way to manage my anxiety, so in addition to fueling perfectionism, I was giving the experience way more weight than it deserved.

And then, when I was telling my mom how much I enjoyed the experience and wanted to learn more and maybe try to figure out how to do some of it professionally, she said, “ok, but how are you going to make a living with it?“

I hadn’t thought that far ahead, and at that point I wasn’t considering it as a career — I was young, it was still an emerging hobby, and I was a long way from being able to earn bus fare doing it, let alone make an actual living. My assumption that you have to have everything planned out before you start, my lack of confidence in my ability to create something that worked, and that conversation killed it for me.

I continued practicing calligraphy for a few years after that (even served on the board of the calligraphy guild in NYC for a couple of years, and did some place cards). Then I got to do two years’ worth of typography when I studied graphic design (one of my instructors had us draw a different typeface every week: upper case, lower case, numbers, and basic punctuation. It was a lot of work, and I loved it).

That was a long time ago. These days I’m enjoying some Trader Joe’s sign writers on Instagram — they’re doing wonderful work, and it’s so fun to watch them create playful, colorful compositions that are supposed to be ephemeral. On the opposite end of that spectrum is John Stevens’s beautiful carved inscriptions.

Here’s the thing. There’s a place for beloved hobbies, even if they never become careers. I see so many talented actors, singers, knitters, bakers, horse folk, gardeners, and artists, who make their livings as teachers, admins, librarians, postal carriers. (One of the Trader Joe’s sign artists I follow is an abstract artist, and the sign work is steadier income.) Point is, everybody has to juggle something, and if you’re lucky, you get to choose what you juggle.

Also, I miss that part of my existence — not the perfectionism, but letterforms and the close observation of them. Maybe it’s time to start drawing letters again.

mental health

Therapy is Great #406,858

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Therapy sucks. A lot of times, it’s less than no fun. But… it has been really good for me.

Starting grad school and having to do group work is bringing up some things from that time I spent more than a decade in a work environment that was abusive.

That was a long time ago, and I’m still trying to process some of it. I still need some help to manage the anxiety triggered by memories of that time.

It didn’t come out of nowhere. I grew up with the explicitly stated expectation that I would defer to the authority of adults general, men in particular. Even if/when they were wrong or had unhealthy/unrealistic expectations. The expectation was absolute.

And then I landed in a work situation with a supervisor who had some unresolved anger issues of their own, that they took out on young women around them. I was not the only (or even the preferred) target, but I ended up in the line of fire with some regularity.

Newsflash: human systems involve chaos. There’s no way around it. You might be the most organized person who ever walked the planet — you cannot plan for every eventuality. At some point, somewhere, someone is going to find a way to introduce the unexpected. It often happens when the stakes are high, it’s painful to resolve, and there might be explanations required after.

Living, for years, with the threat of being screamed at, having your work ethic or competence be questioned behind your back to your colleagues or supervisors, or fired, because you can’t exert absolute control over the chaos… leaves a mark.

Look. I went to art school; I can do critique, even if it’s hard to hear. I appreciate good editing. I understand that my way of doing things is, often, not the best or most efficient way (though I can be slow to accept that in some situations). I also expect that when I make a mistake there will be some accountability.

What I’m talking about is not any of these scenarios.

I’m talking about being yelled at about how incompetent you are, in front of your colleagues, by someone who is not in control of their emotional state, and having no recourse to respond because a) they’re your boss, and b) you don’t have any coping or mitigation skills for that kind of situation.

Back to now: this group project is operationally well defined; there are parts to the project we’re working on as we go, and deadlines we have to meet. My group has been amazing — we all seem to want to make sure that no one has to carry more than their fair share of the burden, so we’ve been working together, adding individual contributions that can be used or not, according to progress of the assignment, and meeting to discuss progress.

One of the challenges is that it involves both technology and concepts that are new to everyone in the group. Add to that the objectives/expectations/rubrics are kind of subjective… because of new technology/concepts and lack of experience, the expectations for the quality of the product should probably be pretty rudimentary… but nobody mentions expectations for use of the technology anywhere, so…?

Combine that set of circumstances with a history of unrealistic expectations and emotional abuse, and the what-ifs in your head crescendo until you (I) find yourself (myself) sitting in 30-degree weather on the back stoop trying to talk yourself (myself) down.

Healthy people seem to be able to right-size what we can accomplish under the circumstances and time constraints. I’ve been an unrelenting hot mess for the last few weeks. I haven’t felt that way in a really long time, and it was kind of frightening.

And that’s why therapy is important for me. I need help contextualizing my past experiences, because I wasn’t able to do it for myself at the time. And I didn’t know how to ask for help at the time — I just assumed that I was really bad at adulting. (Frankly, sometimes I’m surprised I survived that period of my life.)

Have a cute puppy taking a nap; it’s good for the soul.

mental health · Uncategorized

If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing. (Part 1)

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I *finally* saw Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings last week. WOW. So good. I enjoyed every part of it, from soup to nuts. I’m not the best critic — I’ll see any superhero film, and I usually like to see them on the big screen (but not during a pandemic, when I live in place where vaccination rates are too low). Confession: I usually like them because they’re full of action, big music, and pretty people.

But that said, I really liked some of the choices the creators of Shang-Chi made — I liked that so much of the movie’s dialog was Chinese, that the fighting styles were varied and reflected the characters employing them, and that they had the good sense to cast Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung. Simu Liu and Awkwafina were amazing as well.

But the line in the title, “If you aim at nothing, you hit nothing,” stopped me in my tracks. One of the characters in Ta-Lo said it to Katy (Awkwafina) in the context of archery (but, you know, WAY more than archery), and I was like, “mind blown, thank you very much.”

I grew up with a mother who said that she wasn’t into goal-setting, because life is too uncertain to make definite plans. (Technically, she’s not wrong, but that’s not the whole story.)

I have tried for so long to emulate my mother, who is brave, smart, hard-working, creative, compassionate, and did I mention smart?

That said, one of the hallmarks of the dysfunction in my family is gaslighting. It’s so common that they all did it without even knowing it.

Because here’s the thing: my mom decided she wanted to be a nurse in college, AND THEN SHE DID IT. She was an RN/BSN before the BSN part was cool. And then, right after I graduated college, she got her master’s degree. She was an operating room nurse, and then moved into staff training and management. She was a nurse for 40 years. She went on medical missions to Mexico and Mali. When she retired she gave flu shots for a couple of years.

She decided she wanted to apply her musical knowledge and experience to learn to play the Celtic Harp, AND THEN SHE DID IT. Over the last 20 years, she’s played as a student, and now she and her former teacher get together to play duets every once in a while.

After she retired, she decided she wanted to work with little kids, AND THEN SHE DID IT. She tutored some children in reading, and now she assists in a couple of the classrooms in the elementary school near her house.

So, yeah, my mom may not be keen on 5-year-plans, but she knows how to set and pursue goals.

Moral of the story, kids, is that you should watch what your parents DO, not what they SAY, because if they were gaslit their whole lives by their parents (who were likely gaslit by their parents, and so on), you won’t get the whole story from their words.