I’m sad that this chapter of my life is over, at least for now. I’ve found coaching to be incredibly rewarding work, and I miss connecting personally with writers and artists, accompanying them amid challenges and breakthroughs.

I’m also heartened to see mentors and contemporaries carrying on this important work through life’s changes and the world’s cataclysms: 

My first writing coach, Cynthia Morris, recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of her coaching practice, Original Impulse, and continues to offer new programs and services.

Sarah Selecky’s writing course, which I took in its very first incarnation in 2011, is thriving and expanding in its 10th year of operation.

My friend Rhonda Douglas opened the Writer’s Flow Studio to host an active community of writers at all stages, and she also runs the First Book Finish program to help people do just that.

As a lover of commitment and a wrestler of angels, I thrill to see people persevering, building and maintaining their coaching and teaching practices, even as mine comes to an end.

The short, everyday reason I’m closing my practice is that I now work full-time as a content marketing writer. 

I hope to delve into the longer, more existential reasons over the coming weeks and months. The purpose of this blog has long been to support my coaching practice and attract clients, and now that it no longer needs to serve that purpose, I’m free to turn it into something else. What will that be? I look forward to finding out. 

To all my past clients: it’s been a tremendous honour to work with you. Thank you for your openness, vulnerability, and hope.

To my teachers and fellow coaches: I appreciate every hour you invested in my development. None of it will ever be wasted.

To those looking for a creativity coach: I can personally recommend Cynthia, Sarah, and Rhonda, or you can check the listings at the Creativity Coaching Association.

I’ve picked up hiking as my new pandemic pastime. It started in July when I climbed the stairs at Tower Beach with a friend for a virtual Amazing Race challenge, and it led to more stair workouts to build stamina, new running and hiking shoes, and seven completed trails ranging from the charming and accessible Deas Island to the spectacular and challenging Stawamus Chief.

I want to keep hiking this year, because hiking is good to me. The exercise, the scenery, the quiet, the long conversations with my husband, and the sense of accomplishment all lift me up. When my depression was hammering me last summer and fall, hiking had my back. Having so many amazing trails available here in BC makes me feel rich and lucky, even when we’re under lockdown and staying close to Vancouver, so I want to indulge even more this year.

I enjoy planning and tracking my hikes in AllTrails (follow me here!), which records distance, time, and elevation, among other things. So, to add some structure to my general desire to “keep hiking,” I’ve chosen a couple of measurable results to support it.

1. Distance

I wanted a distance goal that would be ambitious but doable, so I looked at how far I hiked in 2020, which was about 80 km. Considering I only started tracking in July, I figured I could do double that distance easily. So, I rounded up and landed on 200 km as my year’s distance goal.

2. Elevation

To balance the distance goal and help me get a good balance of easy, moderate, and hard hikes, I’m adding an elevation goal. The Grouse Grind is about 800 m, so if I do the equivalent of one Grind per month, I should be able to hike the elevation of Mount Everest in a year, which is 8,849 m.

3. Key trails

Finally, I’m choosing a few “crown jewel” hikes to add pizzazz and inspiration. Some of these will depend on travel regulations this year, but I’m hoping to do some dazzlers like the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail and Kain Hut in Bugaboo. I’m tracking this highlight list in AllTrails too.

As lockdown allows, I would love to hike with friends and family too, so I’ll be planning some excursions ahead of time and inviting others to join me.

I’d love to hear your hiking goals and challenges too. What have you done to keep getting yourself outdoors? Any suggestions for my crown jewel hikes this year?

I have creator’s depression. So do a lot of the coaching clients I work with. What exactly does that mean?

Creator’s depression is a term that comes from psychotherapist and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel. In his book The Van Gogh Blues, he says, “the depression that creative people face is fundamentally caused by their upsetness with the facts of existence and their difficulties in making and maintaining meaning.”

The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression was my introduction to Eric Maisel’s work, to the concept of creator’s depression, and to the work of creativity coaching. It is probably the one book that has had the biggest impact on my life (no, I’m not counting the Bible!). The Van Gogh Blues helped me understand the nature of my depression, and how it connected to my work and identity as a writer, and what I needed to be mentally healthy. It also led me to the profession of creativity coaching, which has led to good things for me and the clients I coach.

As part of my certification with the Creativity Coaching Association, I re-read The Van Gogh Blues in 2015 and wrote a response to it. The questions were written by the CCA. The answers are mine. I hope they help you understand more about creator’s depression and how creativity coaching can help.

In the “gestalt” of this book, what new ideas or added value did this book teach you about creativity as applied to yourself?

I first read The Van Gogh Blues in 2005, at the tail end of my recovery from a clinical depression diagnosed in 2002. The book confirmed my instinct that the medication I took and the therapy I did were only part of the solution for ending my depression – I also needed to write in order to feel like my life had meaning. And I needed to make changes to my life (quit my job for freelancing and reduce my volunteering, for example) and stop putting others ahead of myself so that I had the time and energy I needed to write.

The most profound idea that I gleaned from this book the first time around was that I alone was responsible for making my life feel meaningful. Meaning was not out there somewhere in a holy book or external trappings like possessions, status, or lifestyle. Meaning came from within, from my decisions about what mattered to me and my experiences of doing what felt meaningful. This was a scary but liberating realization, and after ten years I still haven’t reached the limits of its implications.

My second reading of the book in 2015 came right after a recurrence of depression. I had just published a memoir that I had been working on for three years, which marked the end of a phase of my life with travel and young children. I also went into a long stretch of unemployment. The loss of these two meaningful activities, writing my memoir and doing copywriting, was a big blow to my mental health.

Revisiting Maisel’s book reminded me how impossible it is to separate depression into biological and psychological experiences, because they are so intertwined. This recent episode of depression was triggered by circumstances and the meaning I was ascribing to them, but it quickly became a very physical experience, with loss of focus and energy and increased anxiety. I returned to medication to help treat the biological side, and I returned to therapy and coaching to help me respond to the meaning crisis that caused the depression in the first place.

It’s humbling to be reminded that knowledge doesn’t always translate into practice, and that meaning is something that must be constantly attended to throughout our lives.

How do the author’s ideas and concepts impact you as a creativity coach? What influence might this book have on your creativity coaching style?

Maisel’s theories about “creator’s depression” have shaped my entire approach and focus as a creativity coach. Working from my personal experiences of depression, I have positioned my coaching practice to specialize in working with writers and artists who are prone to depression. My tagline, Wrestling the Angel, is an allusion to the existential struggle to create meaning. I have also written a memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire, telling the story of my recovery from depression and how I’ve tried to create a meaningful life.

I have always been drawn more to working with the issues of psychology and mental health around creating, rather than teaching craft itself. I think there is a pervasive presumption that if you want to do something, you should just be able to learn it and do it, and if you can’t then there’s something wrong with you. If you invest a lot of identity and meaning into creating, and then that desire to create is thwarted, it can lead to a depressive state that no productivity technique or pep talk can overcome.

I appreciate the way that Maisel integrates a compassionate understanding of the existential challenges of creating with a pragmatic and optimistic approach to dispatching them. I try to model that approach by listening, empathizing, and affirming the difficulties of creating while also staying steadfast in my belief that these difficulties can be addressed and offering specific techniques and practices to do so.

Dealing with depression, doubt, and despair comes up often with the clients I work with. I appreciate having Maisel’s concepts to start from, getting the client grounded in an understanding of how meaning crises can manifest as depression and how to choose and align with their own life purpose to create meaning. It feels like work I’m especially suited for and find satisfying.

One of my clients was a bestselling novelist who had fallen into depression and hadn’t written in a year, although she had another book contracted that was overdue. She was treating her depression with medication and therapy but still struggling with procrastination and overwhelm. Some of the things we worked on together were: 1) helping her reconnect with her love of writing, outside of the career pressures, 2) looking at her tendency to overcommit to others’ requests, and practicing saying no, and 3) revising her self-talk so that she wasn’t making herself feel ashamed and guilty for the need to rest, take her time with the book, and follow her own process.

Another client has chronic depression and anxiety and other health issues that she is working on with a therapist and physician. One of my important jobs as her coach is to help her hold fast to the meaning of her writing, affirming her persistence and her abilities, helping her recognize her own self-sabotage and make choices related to her projects, her writing process, and her support network.

What new vocabulary/terminology/phraseology about creativity did you learn from this book that you might teach to a client or use while coaching?

I appreciate the terms “creator’s depression” and “existential depression” for describing this particular affliction. Unlike depression that is more biological in origin, which “comes out of nowhere” or “for no reason,” this type of depression has a particular cause and strikes a particular demographic. The fact that it can morph into a physical illness makes it no less formidable.

I do also find it helpful to have the word “meaning” and all of its various compounds to talk about existential issues. A “meaning crisis” is good shorthand for the state of questioning the purpose or significance of one’s work, asking that question, “What’s the point? Why bother?”

A “meaning practice” as a habit of checking in with yourself and identifying the parts of your day that feel most meaningful or purposeful is also a useful term.

I also talk about “meaning containers” that can help collect or concentrate meaning, and I help clients develop dreams or projects that provide the structure they need.

“Meaning shifts” happen often as life circumstances change, projects move from beginning to end, and priorities or experience evolve. I encourage clients to notice these meaning shifts (often indicated by feelings of depression or doubt) and make new decisions about where to make meaning investments of time, energy, and identity.

In using this book with clients, I’ve encountered some pushback around the term meaning, which people feel is used as a catch-all or even, ironically, a meaningless term that Maisel throws around indiscriminately. With these clients, I try talking about “story” — the narrative that we develop around our lives and efforts, and the fact that we can change the story we’re telling if it’s not serving us. Stories are, in essence, a way of capturing what characters and settings and actions mean, so this approach often works well with writers, and also dovetails with the cognitive approach to managing one’s thoughts that Maisel advocates.

Are there any exercises that you can develop from this book to use with your clients? Or did the book contain any exercises from the author that you would like to use with clients?

The Van Gogh Blues is more conceptual than Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning, Maisel’s follow-up book, which offers a step-by-step plan for depression-proofing. However, some of the concepts do lead into exercises that I use.

One of my client intake questions is, “Do you have words to describe the purpose of your life?” If clients aren’t able to answer that question, I encourage them to work with it and come up with some statement that guides their efforts.

In dealing with anxiety, I have clients tell me or write down the thoughts and excuses that are keeping them from their creative work. Then we explore together what the underlying anxieties might be that prompt them to use these excuses. Difficulty choosing a project, for example, often masks worries that a project will fail or be a waste of time. So we question the definition of failure or come to grips with the real risks and rewards of committing to an idea.

I also have clients get specific about their goals or desired outcomes for a project, or even their creative career as a whole. This exercise helps us see where their meaning goals are short-term or long-term, goals that can be met in the creative process or only after completion, goals that are within their control or not. Then we can recalibrate to make sure that their needs for meaning are being met immediately, daily, in ways they can influence, so they can sustain their creative efforts.

Would you recommend this book to a client to read? Can you think of a situation when a client might benefit from this book?

The Van Gogh Blues is a book I recommend often to clients in conjunction with Rethinking Depression, which includes practical steps for creating a meaning practice. I recommend it specifically if a client mentions a history or symptoms of depression such as anhedonia (lack of enjoyment), sadness, or doubt about the significance of their life and work.

In September/October 2015, I ran an online book club for The Van Gogh Blues. We had 20 participants, and it was illuminating to see how they responded to reading the book and answering questions about each chapter over the course of six weeks.

Most of all, people appreciated having a safe environment where they could talk about their experience of depression openly, without worrying about stigma or judgment. We used Maisel’s ideas as a jumping-off point to share stories, encouragement, and helpful ways of dealing with depression. People appreciated being able to read in a group and think more deeply about the content.

Participants were also up-front about the limits of Maisel’s work, ranging from difficulty with his terminology (the vagueness of “meaning”) to some frustration with his ideas around “forcing” life to mean. Not everyone felt compelled by the book, but it gave us something to react to and work with.

My online article Ten Signs of Walking Depression has attracted a lot of traffic and has been valuable in helping people recognize low-grade depression in themselves and connect it to their thwarted creative drive. Maisel’s book provides a portrait and diagnosis of creator’s depression that points people in the direction of the remedy they need.

What are your 3-5 favourite sentences or paragraphs from this book that you would like to remember for all time and quote to your clients?

I used two quotations from The Van Gogh Blues in my memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire, and they are some of the most frequently highlighted passages in that book, according to Amazon.

“Creators have trouble maintaining meaning. Creating is one of the ways they endeavour to maintain meaning. In the act of creation, they lay a veneer of meaning over meaninglessness and sometimes produce work that helps others maintain meaning. This is why creating is such a crucial activity in the life of a creator: It is one of the ways, and often the most important way, that she manages to make life feel meaningful. Not creating is depressing because she is not making meaning when she is not creating. Creating but falling short in her efforts is also depressing because only insufficient meaning is produced if her products strike her as weak or shallow. Even creating well can be depressing because of the lingering sense that what she is doing is only veneering meaninglessness.” p. 5-6

“‘What is my right path?’ ‘All paths are the same; they end up in the same place. What is important is to ask yourself, ‘Does this path have a heart?’ If the answer is ‘yes,’ then that is the right path for you.” p. 185

I also appreciate these quotations:

“I believe that depression in creative individuals is best thought of as a meaning crisis caused by chronic, persistent uneasiness, irritation, anger, and sadness about the facts of existence and life’s apparent lack of meaning.” p. 19

“If they can overcome the emotional blocks to this examination, if they can come up with a personal creed that they find believable, and if they can learn to recognize how every second either supports or endangers the meaning they intend to make, they have a decent chance of living a life that feels meaningful to them.” p. 35

“This is the conversation about meaning that contemporary people fear they will have and expect they will have once they admit that meaning is a problem. They recognize that, like Ionesco, they are victims of the righteous demise of blind faith, the installation of materialism as the world’s reigning philosophy, and the widespread meta-analysis of belief that casts all belief into doubt. They recognize they are victims of increased knowledge, increased awareness, and a paucity of meaning options. To the question, ‘Why not have a little conversation about meaning?’ they are inclined to answer, ‘No, thanks! I know where I’ll end up, which is more depressed than I am right now.’” p. 42

“How many creators feel like parasites? Like untouchables? If you are one of these creators, you have to change your mind and heal your heart. You have to tell yourself, ‘I am the beauty in life. It took a whole universe to create me and here I stand, fully human.’ The song you write may be beautiful, the research you conceive may be beautiful, but you are the real beauty in life. Your sense of your own beauty will colour everything and bring you a measure of peace, even as your trials continue.” p. 120-121

I’m wondering: what do you think of creator’s depression? Is it a helpful concept? How have you dealt with creator’s depression yourself? 

If creativity coaching sounds like a good thing, you can find out more about how to Work with Me.

My last post was about emotional labour and how it contributes to creator’s depression. I wanted to continue with some thoughts on how I manage the demands of emotional labour (AKA what I do when putting my hands over my ears and yelling at everyone to leave me alone isn’t an option).

Recognize and name what you’re doing as emotional labour.

There is some confusion out there in the popular media about the overlap between emotional labour and household management. As a technical writer, I appreciate and highly recommend Haley Swenson’s article, Please Stop Calling Everything that Frustrates You Emotional Labour, because it defines emotional labour as separate from 1) labour that creates feelings, 2) activism, 3) scheduling and mental load, and 4) educational labour.

Here’s an example. Scheduling my son’s dental appointment is not emotional labour, it’s logistics. The emotional labour comes in deciding when to tell him about the appointment, listening to him freak out about the appointment while staying calm myself, making sure we leave early enough so that I don’t have to rush him, reminding him of how he’s gotten through these appointments before, refraining from scolding him for not brushing his teeth, squeezing his hand tightly while the dentist inserts the freezing, sitting in the corner reading a magazine during the procedure, and hugging and praising him afterward. That’s the emotional labour of managing my own and Nico’s feelings so I can get him into the dental chair.

As I’ve noticed myself doing this stuff, I’ve given myself a lot more credit for it. I’ll notice when a weekend is emotional labour 24/7 and Monday morning feels like a vacation.

Noticing helps me stay realistic about my capacity. So I’m less inclined to beat myself up for not writing because I know how hard I’m working at other things.

Get someone else to do emotional labour for you.

Family and friends often get tapped to do this, and it’s an important part of relationships. You need someone to listen when you’re complaining about the kids’ latest antics or feeling anxious about money. But emotional labour between friends and family may not always be reciprocal, and they may not be good at it. (No shade here, feelings are just not everyone’s forte.)

This is where I highly recommend calling on a professional.

I don’t have to take care of my therapist AT ALL. I don’t have to ask questions about how she’s doing or remember things about her life. I don’t have to censor or modulate any of my feelings. I can just lay the whole messy pile on the table and she will find the patterns, give it some shape, help me dispose of some feelings and keep others. I can’t even tell you how nurturing this is. When I’m in my therapist’s office, I know I’m safe. She won’t get angry with me or disappointed with me. I won’t suddenly have to apologize or kick myself for saying the wrong thing. Whatever I’m going through, she can handle it. (Side benefit: seeing her perform emotional labour with such skill teaches me how to do it better.)

It’s okay to name your emotions, even when you’re regulating them.

I’m super-conscious of not making my kids responsible for my emotions. It’s not their job to look after my feelings. But sometimes I do such a good job of staying calm when I’m angry, or upbeat when I’m sad, that I worry I run the risk of making them think that their actions aren’t affecting me at all. I realized that there’s a difference between expressing my feelings and making my kids do emotional labour for me.

Now, I try to remember to state how I’m feeling so my kids are aware. For instance, I’ll say, “When you wrecked my [insert personal item here], I felt sad and angry.” Or “I’m really frustrated because we’re late.” Then I feel like my humanity has been acknowledged and they get a chance to be more thoughtful. (Side benefit: they copy my modelling. The other night my 10yo son said, “When Lia [does that sibling thing], I don’t feel safe or respected.” !!! Proud mama moment, that.)

Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.

No one can make me do emotional labour for others. I don’t owe it to anyone. I have promised it to my husband and kids, but I can still set reasonable limits with them.

But people-pleasers like me have a hard time exercising their right to say no. So maybe here is where the naming and noticing emotional labour can be put to good use. Say I’m in a conflict with someone—I’m upset with them or they’re upset with me. In the past, I might have done everything I could to resolve things to reassure myself and them that I’m a good person. Now I check my boundaries first. How much am I willing to extend myself? Is this relationship important enough to demand the emotional labour required? Then I make the decision based on my capacity and willingness to repair the relationship. I might engage or I might just let things go. And that’s okay; I’m just one human, after all.

One big insight that came to me during a parenting class I took this fall was about how boundaries are protective, not punitive. They’re protective for me, yes, because they preserve my energy and keep me from getting resentful. But they’re protective for other people too. Boundaries stop others from taking advantage. They communicate that I’m a safe person who can be trusted to take care of myself. They teach others about what’s appropriate or legitimate to ask for. And boundaries help people learn to take responsibility for their own emotional labour.

When I set and enforce a boundary, I’m not trying to punish the other person. I’m just reminding us all who I am, where my responsibility starts and ends.

I think I’ll end it there for now. I’d like to know from you, how do you manage the demands on your emotional labour? What works for you?

My family doctor first diagnosed me with clinical depression in 2002, when I was twenty-nine years old. Despite the fact that I had experienced stress and depression in high school and university, it was still a shock to admit that I was a person with mental health issues and that I needed to get treatment.

Coming to terms with creator’s depression

Reading Eric Maisel’s work on depression in creative people was a big help in reconciling me to my condition. Instead of seeing myself as sick, weak, or broken, I recognized that I was someone who had a high need for meaning and self-expression. That pull toward meaning felt like a strength, a positive quality. Yes, it made me prone to depression, but it also made me sensitive, motivated, and thoughtful, driven to live from a clear sense of purpose. I was able to embrace my experience of creator’s depression, to own it, and to be public about it, because I could see it as an occupational hazard of my vocation as a writer, not as a defect.

Creator’s depression is Eric Maisel’s term. He says, “the depression that creative people face is fundamentally caused by their upsetness with the facts of existence and their difficulties in making and maintaining meaning.” (The Van Gogh Blues, p. 223)

I was also attached to the idea of leaving depression behind, walking away from it. I worked really hard on healing—taking medication, seeing my doctor regularly, going to numerous therapists and counsellors, and changing my life to reduce stress and prioritize my own dreams and goals. I’m proud of the work I did. I faced some hard truths about my limiting beliefs, like “If I do the right thing all the time, nothing bad will happen to me,” and “I can’t be happy unless everyone else is happy.”

This story, of my first deep encounter with and recovery from depression, is the story I tell in my memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire. It’s a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end—a full walk of the labyrinth, the inward journey of Release, the still centre of Illumination, and the outward journey of Reunion. I believe it’s a good story—hopeful, honest, and helpful for its true audience.

And the larger story of my life carries on after Pilgrimage of Desire ends. In 2015, just after my memoir was published, I entered the labyrinth again. My depression returned.

It took about six months for me to admit that I was depressed again. Not because I didn’t recognize it, not because it was mild (it wasn’t), but because I was ashamed. How could I, as a coach and author and a smart person, let myself get depressed again? I felt like I had gotten over-confident, that I had failed to apply what I knew and take care of myself. (Of course, that was the depression talking.)

Now it’s three years later. I am stable on medication (Celexa and Dexedrine). I see my psychiatrist for group medical visits. I support my immune system with supplements. My naturopath monitors my hormone levels. I have weekly sessions with my therapist. I’m mentally healthy, and I can look at my relapse with the clarity of time and realistic thinking.

So what have I learned? Why did I relapse? What, if anything, could I have done to prevent it?

I have a feeling that it will take me several posts to answer these questions thoroughly, so I’m going to start with one topic that touches on many aspects of my identity: as a creator, as a people-pleaser, as a wife, daughter, and mother.

I know a lot of people who share these traits. I know many of us are looking for answers to why we struggle with feelings of overwhelm, resentment, hopelessness, and despair, even when our lives look pretty good from the outside. What I’ve learned has been hard-won, and sharing it with others feels like putting that pain and effort to good use. So here goes.

Emotional labour: the hidden tax

Emotional labor is simply the management of feelings (your own or someone else’s) to accomplish some goal—to leave a customer satisfied or to get someone to do something they might not otherwise want to, or to keep your household functioning.

Note that there are many other kinds of labor that can produce these outcomes too (simply providing information to someone, for instance), but emotional labor concerns the work of emotion management—say, delivering bad news about a flight cancellation in a comforting way, so that disgruntled passengers hardly notice the news is bad. At home, this might mean giving solace to a crying child with warm words and a calm demeanor or intervening between your mom and your sister when a fight about Trump threatens to ruin Thanksgiving.

Haley Swenson, Slate

Emotional labour is a concept that has caught mainstream attention in a powerful way recently. I first encountered it in 2015 on  MetaFilter, in this thread. … And wow, did I feel validated. An enormous part of my work as a human—work that I poured a lot of effort into, work at which I was quite skilled—had been largely invisible, even to me. And now it had a name and a public conversation around it.

Here’s the thing. At that time, I had become the hub of emotional support in our family. My kids’ emotions were getting more complex as they approached the middle grades, and I was having to dig deeper to help them process their fear, anger, and sadness and to solve the problems that were causing them turmoil. My husband’s job was becoming more demanding, which meant I was picking up slack at home and helping him cope with the extra stress from work. This emotional labour looked like: soothing my kids when they had meltdowns, comforting them through tears at bedtime, peacemaking between the siblings, prepping them for stressful situations and transitions, and talking to teachers and parents about what was happening in the classroom and on the playground.

And that’s just the emotional labour I performed at home. I also did this work with friends and extended family, at church, with my coaching clients, and on freelance jobs. Many people, especially women, do this emotional management all the time. That MetaFilter thread has hundreds of examples. I could give you six examples just from yesterday. I’m sure you’ve got your own.

How emotional labour triggers creator’s depression

Looking back, I can see how doing a lot more emotional labour contributed to my relapse.

Emotional labour takes a disproportionate amount of time and energy away from creative work.

In my experience, one hour of emotional labour does not equal one hour of purely physical or mental labour. I find emotional labour much more draining than cooking, cleaning, or even writing, and it takes me longer to recover.

Why? I would love to research a good solid scientific answer. Right now I have my anecdotal evidence, in which an emotional crisis at home requires every ounce of my empathy, ingenuity, faith, and patience, and can knock me down for a day or even a week. Where the low-level effort of acting normal and happy in public when I feel sad or upset sends me straight to bed for a nap.

With all that I was pouring into emotional management, I had even less to devote to the work of creativity: reading, writing, daydreaming, promoting my books, and keeping my mood up in order to do all of the above. And creators are vulnerable to depression when they’re not creating.

Emotional labour is often unrecognized, which makes it feel less meaningful.

So I’m doing all this demanding emotional work. But I’m not getting paid for it. I’m not getting a promotion to Vice President of Mothering. I’m not earning my degree in Advanced Parenting Techniques. When I get asked what I accomplished in a day, I’m not listing the hours I spent listening, validating, problem-solving, and limit-setting—basically acting as someone else’s prefrontal cortex.

When I can’t spend as much time creating, I try to find meaning in other activities that matter to me. Parenting and emotional labour are important to me. But because they don’t get the same recognition (let alone the same pay) as other types of work, their meaning can leak away, making me more susceptible to depression.

The burden of competence means we take take on more than our fair share.

What makes us creative often makes us good at emotional labour. Keen observation and self-reflection, a sense of justice and compassion, a desire for joy and beauty … the skills that attract us to art also make us good at managing emotions and give us the incentive to do so. And because we’re good at it, we end up doing more of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being good at emotional labour. I want to keep getting better at it. I love being of service. When I’ve turned a situation around, when a kid goes from screaming to smiling and saying, “I love you,” I feel on top of the world.

But the more emotional labour I do for those around me, the fewer resources I have left for myself and my creative work. And again, I’m left vulnerable to a deficit of meaning and depression that entails.

Our life design needs to take emotional labour into account

I’ve written a lot about making life changes so we can prioritize our creative work. Practical things like doing less volunteering and reducing our household chores. Now I’m beginning to understand that we need to consider how much emotional labour we’re doing and how it’s impacting our ability to create art and maintain meaning.

I hope to write more about how I’ve addressed the demands of emotional labour in my own life. For now, I’d love to know: How does this strike you? Do you see a personal connection between depression and emotional labour? What does it mean for you?

Please leave a comment or share your thoughts privately through email. This is an important conversation to have, I think.

Over the holidays, my dad and I assembled this DIY origami butterfly mobile. I love it so much. This mobile is an object of ongoing beauty, gently twirling in my bedroom, and it is also a scale map of my creative process, which for me takes the shape of a labyrinth.

When I am depressed, and also when I am mentally stable but stressed and overwhelmed, I do not have the focus or energy for a long in-depth creative endeavour like a novel, or even an essay. But I need to practice my creativity to help me recover from stress and depression. It’s a Catch-22. How to do something artistic and fulfilling that I can manage?

That’s when I look for a mini-labyrinth: a highly structured small-scale creative project. This DIY origami butterfly mobile is a perfect example. In addition to being small and well-defined, I also prefer that a mini-labyrinth be cross-discipline (for me that means visual art, music, or dance, rather than writing), that it have some community element, and that it be meaningful and expressive of my values.

Let me illustrate by explaining the steps to make your own DIY origami butterfly mobile.

Supplies:

• origami paper
• nylon thread or monofilament
• wooden embroidery hoop
• crimp beads
• large beads
• wire

Step 1: Buy some paper

I made my mobile with a pack of 100 sheets of multi-coloured paper, 7.5 cm (3″) square. I found this paper in an enormous stationery shop in Hong Kong, across from the apartment where we were staying. This was during our three-week trip to China over March Break. My kids and I wandered the floors, enthralled, choosing our treasures carefully. I didn’t know yet what I would make from this paper but I knew it was special. So tiny! So many colours! So many possibilities!

You can buy your origami paper from Amazon, of course
Toyo Origami, Tant 7.5cm x 7.5cm, 100 Colors, 1 Each (007203)

Step 2: Sign up for #The100DayProject

#The100DayProject is a cool personal challenge with a big community component. The official website calls it “a free global art project that anyone can participate in.” You can sign up to get weekly prompts and announcements, or you can just post your photos with the hashtag.

Photo Source

The stars aligned for me on this. A week after arriving home from Hong Kong, I discovered that #The100DayProject was starting in just a few days. And I had exactly 100 pieces of origami paper. After a little research, I decided that I wanted to fold butterflies. (Cranes seemed too ubiquitous. Besides, spring and rebirth were on my mind.) I chose a custom hashtag, #100daysofbutterflies, to identify my project.

Step 3: Fold a butterfly

I followed the folding instructions from this origami butterfly tutorial, using scissors to round off the wings because I liked the way they looked.

Then I staged a photo and posted it on Instagram with the hashtags and a dedication to a special new friend.

001/100 Not bad for a first try! I like the simplicity of the folds, with the potential for lots of variation. And the 3D shape. I’m hoping to assemble the finished butterflies into a rainbow mobile. Today’s butterfly is dedicated to a special new friend. #100daysofbutterflies #the100dayproject

A post shared by Alison Gresik (@agresik) on Apr 4, 2017 at 9:44am PDT

This small act gave me a tremendous burst of joy and energy, which is a sign that this was a good mini-labyrinth for me.

Step 4: Get inspired

While I was looking for butterfly folds, I found this amazing origami maker in Australia, Peter Whitehouse, who was doing a fold every day in 2017! Some of them are incredibly intricate. I subscribed to his origami blog so I would get a steady supply of visual inspiration. (I was especially tickled when he went on a butterfly kick in June.)

Photo Source

I also discovered a woman on Instagram doing #100daysofpaperrabbits with found materials from her home. So imaginative and adorable.

A post shared by arrie (@rabbitpractice) on May 15, 2017 at 8:31pm PDT

And there were butterflies in my neighbourhood too, in the window display of a Japanese clothing store and in the advertising for HSBC.

All of these sightings made me feel befriended — serendipitous signs that I was not alone in the world, but that there were people out there like me, folding paper, making something that held a little piece of themselves.

Step 5: Fold more butterflies

If you fold one butterfly a day, it will take you a little more than three months. If you want to fold them all at once, you can probably finish in a day or two.

My natural length of attention for a daily project is two weeks. I know this about myself. Still, I hoped that the structure and community of #the100dayproject would keep me going longer than that. Alas, no. After about 14 days I started to get behind. Some days I just forgot. Some days I was unhappy with the quality of my folds, or the originality of my photo styling. Some days I was travelling. A few times I caught up, folding and posting multiple butterflies in a day. But then I got a month behind, and then six weeks. Unphotographed butterflies accumulated on my desk.

Finally, two months into the project, I asked myself, “What is my goal for this project? What is central? Is it the photos? The dedications? The daily consistency? Or the butterflies themselves? How do I want to complete this?”

At the time, I couldn’t let go of any of those things. I wanted to finish thoroughly, the way I had started. I did try. I arranged all the folded, unphotographed butterflies on a calendar. I worked away at them for a few days. But I posted my last butterfly on June 2. I stopped folding altogether. I felt sad and guilty and flummoxed every time I looked at the pile of butterflies I kept in a glass vase.

Step 6: Enlist a partner

In December, my mom and dad arrived for a three-week visit and I knew there was hope for my butterfly mobile after all. My father is a retired dentist, very skilled with his hands, having sculpted many teeth over the years, who has now turned his attention to wood carving and paper crafts. He made an exquisite bird mobile for my daughter Lia, and I knew he had the interest and abilities to help me finish this particular project.

I also knew that I love getting immersed in a project, spending an intensely focused period of time to get it done. And I am more likely to apply myself when I’m working with someone else. So I was confident that this was the way to completion. I let go of photographing and dedicating the butterflies, let go of creating a photo book from my Instagram stream, and concentrated on the finished product: a mobile hanging in my room.

I presented my dad with the goal early on in our visit, and we spent some time planning and researching. I had bought some metal rings and monofilament at the bead store, but Dad showed me that the monofilament would not hold knots well, nor would it stay stable on the metal rings.

Then we came across the idea of using bead crimps thanks to this how-to for an origami crane mobile. Bead crimps were easier to use than knots and would allow us to be more precise with butterfly placement. We visited the bead store again to buy crimps, and also picked up some sample beads to use as weights, and some nylon thread to test.

We debated how many strings to make, how many butterflies would go on each string, and how far apart they would be spaced. I tried several arrangements — did I want all butterflies of one colour on a single string? Did I want them arranged by tone, with pastels at the top and brights at the bottom?

Finally, I settled on a gradient, with yellows at the top, transitioning to greens, blues, purples, pinks, and reds. This also meant that each individual string was its own mini-gradient.

I played with the colours, re-arranging to get the most contrast. I also decided not to fold butterflies from the grey and black paper at the bottom of the stack. I let go of making 100 butterflies and just kept the colours that made me happy.

After a few test strings, where we compared fastenings and considered spacing, we were ready to go.

Step 7: Assemble the mobile

Lay out seven strings of butterflies, which will give your mobile some asymmetry when it’s hanging. I varied the number of butterflies in a string from 10 to 14 so that the strings would be of different lengths.

Glue the butterflies with hot glue to keep it from coming apart in the mobile. We unfolded each butterfly’s “antenna” and used a tiny dot of glue underneath to secure it.

Cut a 50″ length of white nylon string. I chose the nylon string because it hung more naturally. But if you prefer your thread to be invisible, use monofilament.

Attach a crimp bead 5″ from the bottom of the string. We used silver-coloured crimp tubes but you could possibly use smaller round crimp beads. My dad created a little paper template and attached it to the table, to make the measurements easier. We used both needle-nosed pliers and some larger locking pliers to flatten the crimps enough so that they didn’t slide off the string.

(My dad’s poor hands! He provided all the muscle while I just held things. It took me back to the days when I would assist him at the dental office, handing him tools and suctioning while he worked.)

With a needle on the thread, pierce the bottom butterfly from bottom to top, in about the middle of the central fold. Push it down until it sits against the crimp bead.

Attach another crimp bead 2″ above the first butterfly.

Continue to string butterflies and attach crimps until you have seven completed strings. If you cut the string when you’re squeezing a crimp, as we did a few times, thread both ends of the cut string into the crimp bead, one from below and one from above, and squeeze the crimp to hold them together.

Thread an anchor bead on the bottom of each string. Attach a crimp as close to the bottom of the string as possible to hold the bead on.

Cut grooves into your embroidery hoop. We used the inner hoop (without the screw mechanism) from a 9″ embroidery hoop. Cut 7 evenly spaced grooves on one edge of the hoop — these will be used to anchor the strings. Cut 4 evenly spaced grooved on the other edge of the hoop — these will be used to anchor the hanging wire. My dad used his pocket knife as a saw to make the grooves.

Mark each string 2″ above the top butterfly with a black marker.

Wrap each string around the hoop in one of the pre-cut grooves, positioning the black mark at the top of the hoop. Wrap several times and then secure with a dab of hot glue. Continue until you have attached all seven strings.

Cut lengths of wire and attach to the 4 grooves at the top of the hoop. Twist the lengths of wire together to form a hanger.

Hang and enjoy!

There you have it, my latest creative project. I was so happy when I saw it hanging that I clapped my hands, jumped up and down, and gave my dad a big hug. I loved the process of collaborating with him, sharing ideas, evaluating methods, and crafting in extended companionable silence. Those feelings and memories come back to me whenever I watch the mobile from my bed.

Now, tell me about your mini-labyrinths.

What small creative projects have seen you through droughts and difficulties? I have more of mine to share with you, but I love seeing what others are doing. And please link to your projects! It would be fun to feature others here too.

P.S. I wish I had a better name than “mini-labyrinths.” I will think on that. Let me know if you come up with something.

P.P.S. This is my first blog post since my paperback was released last summer! You can now get my memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire: An Explorer’s Journey Through the Labyrinths of Life, in a form you can hold in your hands, highlight, dog-ear, and fill with margin notes.

I think I’ll stay under here where it’s safe.

In his podcast episode called Emergency, Benjamen Walker speaks into a secret recorder hidden in a pen while sitting in a hot tub:

I fled my studio for Spa Castle … I’m just finding it impossible to work these days. It’s the news, blaring out of the radio, blasting from the computer. It’s relentless, and it climbs over every wall I build and slides in under every door I close. There’s no escape.

And as far as I can tell, this is a new thing. Of course, the 24-hour news cycle has been around for decades now, we got that in the 1990s with the Iraq War and the O.J. Simpson case. But it was still a news cycle. That cycle has disintegrated. Today, now, it’s just news all the time. And once you check in, there’s no checking out. There’s no longer a calm after the storm, because it’s a storm that never ends.

And this non-stop hurricane of pain, it’s affecting my mental health, my physical well-being, and my podcast. This is why I’m here, talking to you, dear listener, from a hot tub at Spa Castle. …

The musician Neil Young once said that what is most precious to him is his creative space, a space he goes to great lengths to maintain and protect. Well, the past few months of breaking news has completely broken down the barriers protecting my creative space. It’s now been overrun by hot takes and longreads and memes, tweets, and I’m scared—terrified, actually—that I won’t be able to put everything back together again.

This captures how I feel about writing in the last three years, in general, and definitely here, online. The non-stop hurricane of pain has decimated my mental, physical, and digital creative spaces.

I don’t know how to write on this blog anymore. I know how I used to write, so when I’m in that headspace for the week or so it takes me to write a post, I can write here, but otherwise I feel like I have tape over my mouth. It’s the news and it’s Facebook and it’s parenting pre-teens and it’s Year 5 of living across the country from my family and it’s depression and it’s being in my 40s, facing the reality that things aren’t always going to keep getting better, sometimes things will regress and contract and get worse.

So while I flounder around, boarding up broken windows, sweeping up shards of glass, turning down the volume on the news, I thought I’d tell you where things stand right now.

Lia is eleven. I love her so much that I have to hug and kiss her every chance I get, and thank God she still likes it. She is reading books from the Grade 7 shelf and perfecting her round-off back handspring back tuck. Every day from December to April she wore an orange fox hat named Tiki. A few weeks ago she made a coconut cake from scratch all by herself. I like buying her presents—it’s easy, you just buy something with a fox on it, or something made from strawberries or mango or both.

Nico is nine. He just bought himself a fidget cube, and he has assigned noises to each button and gizmo. His life’s ambition is to get me to belly laugh, which he does often, but he needs to find another audience for his potty humour, because I’m not it. He wrote an excellent short story called “Death Battle,” about a boy named Thor who defends Canada from the monster Holy Fish. I get him to tutoring sessions by play-fighting with him at the bus stop and bribing him with jalapeno Cheetos.

My children are part of the hurricane, and part of the bunker against it.

Today is my wedding anniversary. My marriage to Shawn is now legally allowed to drink in the U.S. In honour of the occasion, I dug up this recording of a men’s quartet singing our wedding text. Shawn is the ground in which the bunker is buried; he is a solid constant.

A love-red butterfly for my one and only.

Reading is my equivalent of noise-cancelling headphones. I have put together a background reading list to inform my current fiction project, and it is both comforting and inspiring at the same time. These are books of utopian fiction, first- and second-wave feminism, middle-class domestic fiction, metafiction, feminist economics. This list would seem pretentious to me except that it’s all so damn inspiring and relevant to what I’m writing, I’m gobbling it up.

I started with the books I had already read, books I had close to hand. Old books bubbled up in my memory, new books surfaced in the Recommendations feed on Goodreads. I’m up to 75 books and I’m aiming for 100. I decided to read the books in order of publication, because I like to eat my vegetables before dessert, but I’m finding that it’s all dessert. I feel like a student again, reading short story cycles for my thesis project.

I’m making butterflies for #the100dayproject and posting them to Instagram. This is turning out to be an ode to my home decorating as well as an origami project.

It’s a real book! With pages!

I don’t watch as much TV since my children started staying up until 9 pm or later. I climb under the covers with one earbud in, listening to Audible, which is the best for reading long, dense books. I’m almost halfway through 27 hours of The Golden Notebook narrated by Juliet Stevenson. I tried to read The Golden Notebook fifteen years ago and couldn’t make it through five pages for boredom. Now I’m riveted. Fascism, socialism, communism, free women, repudiated novels and unfinished novels and diary excerpts—it’s all up-to-the-minute even though it’s the 1950s.

Michelle and I have been inching along with a print version of Pilgrimage of Desire. The designs are all done, we’re reviewing physical proofs, and you’ll be able to order it from Amazon and your local bookstore very soon.

Is it summer yet? I need a breather. I want to do more writing. I think I’ll spread a little sand and a beach towel on the floor of my bunker, hang some rainbow butterflies from the ceiling.

This year I was feeling more energized, and I started paying attention in December for a Word of the Year to cross my path.

The word I met was mise-en-place, a French phrase from the world of professional cooking that literally means “to put in place.” But mise-en-place is so much more, as I am discovering.

In my systems work with Cairene MacDonald, we have talked about mise-en-place in its strictest sense, which involves assembling all of one’s tools and ingredients before beginning to work. We’ve also talked about it in a larger sense, of doing whatever planning and preparation is required to make the work go smoothly. These were useful ideas that I aspired to but could never consistently apply.

The revelation of working clean

Then, in the last days of December, a book title flitted across my computer screen, I don’t even remember how. Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind by Dan Charnas (affiliate link). Hmm. Sounds interesting. Is it one of those fluffy productivity books that recycles random tired ideas at a shallow level? Well, it’s only $1.50 on Kindle, let’s check it out.

To my surprise and pleasure, I found it to be a solidly researched, well-structured, and useful book. Through interviews with top chefs in New York and beyond, Charnas absorbs and transforms old productivity saws into a comprehensive paradigm that struck me as fresh and original.

There are stories to hold my interest and demonstrate principles, helpful exercises, and examples that translate kitchen practices to home and office life. I read quickly through the opening chapters and have slowed down now as Charnas is going through the ten “ingredients” of working clean.

My thought is to make each “ingredient” a focus for one month and do the exercises. But the concepts have already flooded me with new ways of seeing some of my problematic work habits.

I’m just naturally messy. Is that true?

For example: In recent years, I have not been good at tidying up as I go or cleaning as I cook. I make a mess, throw things all over the place. I leave all the pieces of a project out, intending to pick it up again, using the physical stuff as a reminder of what I have left undone. “I’ll come back to that later,” I think to myself. “If I stop to put things away, I won’t be able to keep myself going.” I live with the mess until I can’t stand it any longer, and then I do a marathon cleaning session.

This aversion to cleaning up as I go drives my husband nuts. It strikes him as disrespectful when I leave a mess, especially in a space that he has just cleaned. “Who are you expecting to deal with this?” he asks when I ignore a spill or leave a can to rust in the sink. “We live in a small space, we need to keep it tidy.” I try to explain myself, “It’s just how my brain works. I get distracted. I’m thinking about something else. I’m just trying to get the important stuff done. The rest can wait.”

I revisit advice to writers that says, “The dishes can wait,” and “No one on her deathbed ever wished she’d done more housework,” and “Cleaning is just a form of procrastination,” and I feel justified in my messy ways.

Then along comes Work Clean. It’s right there in the title. Dan Charnas and his chef-experts are very compelling at explaining WHY cleaning as you go is so important, and how it impacts your work from beginning to end.

“Even the most refined systems become useless unless maintained. It is not enough to find a ‘right place’ for everything. Cooks can’t use a static system; the system must move. So the real work of mise-en-place isn’t being clean, but working clean: keeping that system of organization no matter how fast and furious the work is.”

This rings true with me, because I know from Cairene that time management is change management, that no ritual or solution stays put for long, but they must all be tweaked and adapted and pruned continuously.

“What many chefs seem to be aiming for, then, is not cleaning for the sake of cleanliness, but rather cleaning as a spiritual practice. Chefs see a direct correlation not only between the condition of one’s station and one’s mind, but also between the tolerance of dirt and the tolerance of distractions, and between the disposition of oneself to cleaning and to responsibility in general. Thus the idea of ‘working clean’ is not only personal but collective. Our roommate’s mess becomes our mess. Our mess becomes our co-worker’s mess. … This holistic view of cleaning — that it should be integrated into every moment of a chef’s work, and that cooks clean not just for one but for all — creates the foundation for excellence in the professional kitchen.”

I couldn’t clean while I worked just because I knew I ought to, or because my husband wanted me to. But I’m finding that I can do it when I’m doing it for the order of my mind and for the excellence of my work. Just a few days of applying mise-en-place to my daily habits and chores has felt SO different, so meaningful and yes, empowering.

A year of mise-en-place

Mise-en-place. Charnas calls it a philosophy and a system, a setup but also the practice of preparing that setup and the mind state of someone who knows exactly how to think, plan, and move. I am looking forward to a year of learning how to embody all of these aspects of mise-en-place, in service to my life and health and writing.

How about you? What’s been your experience of mise-en-place? And do you have a Word of the Year? I’d love to know.

January and February

My depression, which returned in 2015, took a big downward spike over Christmas, thanks to homesickness and burnout. With the expert and compassionate support of my psychiatrist, I upped my meds, but it took about two months for me to level out again.

Thankfully I’ve been mentally stable since then, and I’ve continued sessions with my therapist, Annie. I’m amazed at the power of long-term weekly therapy, which I’ve never done before. After a year of work with her, I feel like we are still just getting to the good stuff.

March to June

My mental health recovered just in time for our family to enter crisis mode. My kids are at an age where I don’t want to write too specifically about what they’re going through, but I can say that for most of the spring, it was just one traumatic thing after another. I was spending significant time every day doing emotional interventions with the kids, arranging and attending professional appointments, communicating with the school and other parents … it was exhausting and scary.

Crisis mode meant that I had to drop everything anytime the kids needed me. I often missed my weekly writing Meetup, or church, or optional work events, or social outings. I couldn’t go away on my own for a day or two. Life got really small and intense.

July and August

The school year couldn’t end too soon. In fact, we cut it short with a three-week trip to Ontario to decompress and visit family. We all needed the break, and it was wonderful to have downtime. We spent a week with my in-laws, a week at my family’s cottage, and a week in Ottawa. We celebrated at our nephew’s wedding. Shawn and I left the kids with my parents for a few days and we had a twentieth-anniversary getaway in Bobcaygeon. The kids and I rode crazy rollercoasters at Canada’s Wonderland. It was just what the doctor ordered.

Things stayed low-key when we returned to Vancouver. Swimming lessons, day camp, Pacific National Exhibition, bike rides in Stanley Park. My grandfather passed away while we were camping on the Sunshine Coast, and I was able to fly home for a week to attend his funeral and grieve with my family, which is a testament to the fact that the kids were out of crisis and I could leave them for a bit.

September

Back-to-school had even more meaning this year, because the kids were returning to a brand new school building after two years of being bussed to portables at another location. The new space helped shake up some of the troublesome dynamics, as did their new classroom placements. They’re still having challenges, which we’re working away at, but everything is at a lower, more manageable level.

October and November

With more breathing space in my work schedule, and with new insights from my therapy work, I made a commitment in October to return to fiction writing. I decided to revisit a short story collection that I started years ago, and I began working on it regularly. This book will be my major creative project of 2017 so I hope to share more about it as I go along.

I also started recording a Pilgrimage of Desire audiobook, using the free recording space at the Vancouver Public Library, and I am very close to releasing a paperback version of Pilgrimage as well. The ebook has been out for almost two years and is still selling steadily, so I’m excited to make more versions available.

December

December is all about Christmas. After last year’s disaster, I decided that priority number one was to make sure me and my family came through the holiday happy and healthy. Everything else was optional. So I did better planning and got things done early. We also skipped stuff that was just too much. And I’m happy to say that priority number one was accomplished.

December is also when Cairene MacDonald’s new virtual coworking space opened! Homeroom is a great place to get regular support and encouragement, especially for us work-from-home creative types. I’ve been posting there almost every day and I’m looking forward to continuing my apprenticeship in systems crafting and energy management with the Homeroom community.

So there it is, a quick recap of 2016 to get you caught up on where I’m at and explain why I haven’t been around so much. I’m hoping to change that in 2017. And as Mary Poppins says, “Well begun is half done.”

So here’s my experience. I’ve had various therapists over the years since I was first diagnosed with depression, and the main thing that they’ve done for me is to help me see myself better. They’ve helped me make connections between things that I never thought were related. They’ve pointed out where I’ve been lying to myself through my thoughts. They’ve coaxed out my feelings and validated them. They’ve seen through my verbal dodges and held up the mirror so I can see my blind spots.

And seeing myself better makes me happier. The schism between who I think I am and who I really am gets smaller, which is another way of saying that I am being healed / made whole. Seeing myself better provokes compassion for myself, sometimes even a wonder and delight at the intricate logic of my psyche.

And when I see myself better, I make better choices, because I’m making them based on the reality of who I am, rather than a distorted outdated approximation.

My depression returned last year, and part of my response was to find a new therapist here in Vancouver. I hadn’t been seeing anyone since we left Ottawa four years ago. Why not? Because it’s hard to find a new therapist. It’s hard to justify the time and expense, especially when I’m not actively mentally ill. It’s hard to prioritize my own needs when there are other family demands. And also, I had a writing project. For almost four years, I had Pilgrimage of Desire. Writing a memoir was a kind of self-directed therapy.

Thankfully, I had been discovered the website of Alison Crosthwait, a Toronto therapist who was writing deftly and honestly about the process of therapy. We had corresponded a little, and in July I reached out to ask whether she could recommend somene in Vancouver. Alison quickly and graciously sent me a list of names and some suggestions about who to reach out to first.

So I’ve been seeing Annie since October. I’ve been going almost every week, which is new for me. I like that schedule because the ideas stay fresh and we can pick the conversation right up where we left off. So far we have not been problem-solving. She doesn’t give me homework. There are no tools or strategies. We are just getting everything out on the table. We are going over all of my stories, and she’s pointing out how my body reacts unconsciously to the things I’m saying. We’re finding metaphors to describe what I’m afraid of and what I believe. These are not necessarily brand-new revelations. The same themes have come up many times before, but we are noticing how deep and pervasive and real they are, and we are charting their course through new stages of life: turning forty, raising school-age kids, living far away from my parents and siblings. We are uncovering and remembering the truth and beauty of me, Alison Jean.

And what’s made me happiest is that therapy is urging me back to my writing. Since I finished Pilgrimage, I haven’t known what to work on next. I’ve done a little journalling, started an essay, re-read an unfinished children’s novel, but nothing has seized me. Now I’m feeling the tug toward my short fiction. I have a few finished stories, a few more drafted, a list of possible topics. Short fiction suits my time and attention span these days. So my last few nights at writing group have been devoted to digging up my notes and manuscripts and letting things marinate.

I like that this reawakening didn’t come from my therapist saying, “Are you writing? Maybe you should write more. Doesn’t that feel meaningful to you?” It came as a natural consequence of sifting through this material, doing a detailed character sketch of myself. It came from wanting to carry on the conversation outside of therapy. It came from my mind being alive and following what feels good.

Alison Crosthwait has published a book called What It Feels Like to Change that collects her online writings, which I recommend to anyone who is engaged with or interested in the therapeutic process.

(And that is how one tricks oneself into writing a blog post, with a head cold, at 10 pm at night, on the fourth day of your husband’s trip out of town.)

P.S. Pilgrimage of Desire the ebook is celebrating its one-year anniversary! I am so thankful that it has found its way into the hands of hundreds of people. To mark the occasion, I’ll be donating all of the proceeds from January 2016 book sales to the Mood Disorders Association of BC.

I also have Pilgrimage bookmarks! Leave a comment on this post and I will send you two: one for a friend, and one to keep.

Wishing you well, friends. We’re all in this together.