March 31, 2020

One thing for yourself

We all have bad days at work. I used to have a lot of them. Long hours, hostile colleagues, the type of stress that makes you want to pull your hair out. At the end of days like this, I looked back on them and struggled to feel as though I had accomplished anything at all.

On days like this, I used to think the best thing I could do to recover from it all was to heat a ready-made meal, fire up the TV and lose myself in another episode of my favourite familiar sitcom. On days like this, the last thing I felt like doing is coming home and getting the watercolours out or writing the next page of a manuscript.

But here’s the thing…

I found that if I got to the end of a day and I hadn’t done just one thing for myself, I felt even worse. If I hadn’t chipped away at a poem, or added another 300 half-arsed words to my latest story, or at least drawn a few doodles, the feeling of wading through mud only increased.

In the same way that people who drink coffee ‘need one’ to kickstart the day, or someone practising mindfulness or meditation doesn’t feel ‘normal’ until they’ve had their 5-minutes of presence, art-making became that one thing for me. Maybe that ‘one thing a day’ can be making something. Anything. Progress.

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