Why Making Stuff Saves Me, Or At Least Stops Me from Losing It Completely!

You see, living with CPTSD and depression is a bit like owning a house where the heating only works in one room, and the boiler is shouting at you for using the oven. Everything else, your thoughts, your feelings, just drifts around like dust. And yet, somehow, you have to function. People assume you’re coping because you smile in the queue at Greggs, or because you can make toast without setting the smoke alarm off, or burning the house down completely. But really, you’re just standing there, hoping the mental house doesn’t collapse on you.

For me, the only way to survive this internal disrepair is to make stuff. And when I say “make stuff,” I don’t mean something coherent. I mean, for example, taking a piece of discarded timber, a blob of paint, maybe some kind of vaguely dangerous object I liberated from a skip, and turning it into a chair that is both unbalanced and strangely beautiful, or at least functional enough that it won’t immediately impale and kill anyone who sits on it. And somehow, in the act of making it, the noise in my head - constant, cruel, repetitive - shuts the fuck up for a while and subsides. Not completely, of course. That would be too perfect. But enough that I can breathe, or at least not scream at the lady from the council that is constantly calling to check that i'm paying the right amount of tax.

Workshops and collaborative projects are the same, only with other people present. Watching someone else turn a piece of rubbish into something surprising, or failing spectacularly and laughing about it, reminds me that humans are weirdly resilient, and that my own weirdness isn’t such a problem. Art, in this sense, isn’t a cure. It isn’t a bandage or a panacea. It’s more like standing in a rainstorm under a surprisingly large umbrella that’s held together with duct tape and optimism. We all know that at some point the umbrella will fail, the duct tape will split, and we are all gunna get soaked - but today isn't that day!

And the thing is, you don’t need perfection. You don’t need 'Instagram-ready'. You just need the process. A crooked brushstroke, a bent chair leg, a story that veers off into nonsense.... these aren’t failures. They’re proof that the world still exists outside your own head. That you still exist. That even rubbish has potential.

So yes, making stuff saves me. Not dramatically, not heroically, and certainly not in a way that makes a good anecdote at the increasing amount of 'Creative Networking Events' that I am having to attend to justify to the world that I am an artist. But it does. Every chaotic creation is a reminder: life is messy, brains can get fucked up and become unreliable, but hands are reliable enough to make something that, even if only for a moment, proves you can still do this.