3 October 2018.
Dear <<First Name>>,
It’s October, so of course it’s time for my September newsletter!
This month, I thought I’d tackle the topic of depression and creativity—something that’s been at the forefront of my thoughts lately. I hope you find it helpful!
In this issue:
- Depression and the creative
- Oz Comic Con Sydney
- A few thoughts about Crazy Rich Asians
- What is making me happy
- Upcoming events
Depression and the creative
I am by no means an expert on depression. I am a depression sufferer, but my sort of depression is my own and no one else’s. But publishing a book on the subject has made me a little more visible, and as a result, occasionally I get asked things about it. I also read things about it or related to it semi-regularly, and as I go through life with all its ups and downs, mental health is never far from my thoughts.
So what follows is a collection of loose thoughts about depression and mental health as it relates to creativity. It is by no means comprehensive, and the things I talk about may have no bearing on your lived experience. Nevertheless, I offer them up in the hope that you might find them useful in some way—and if they are not relevant to you, perhaps they will be to someone else.
Pressing in on depression
[B]eing depressed is a lot like … wearing this weird diving bell suit made of Ziploc baggies or something. And you’re there with other people and you can see them and hear them and touch them through the baggie or something, but you can’t conduct electricity. (Neko Case in an interview with NPR.)
People sometimes ask me, “How do I know if I’m depressed? How do I know it’s depression and not just having a bad day?” Generally speaking, depression is not just having a bad day; it’s low mood that persists for longer than two weeks.
It’s incredibly common, though I am still surprised at the number of people who don’t seem to know that. One stat I read says that one in four will suffer from some kind of depression over the course of their lives. This does not necessarily mean that they will be suicidal or that they will require medication; it just means that 25 per cent of us will travel through a dark period of low mood at some point. Given those stats, I think it’s good to expect it—and to even be prepared.
The thing is, there are different kinds of depression. Generally speaking (and it may be a bit reductionistic to say this), everyone falls along a spectrum between depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain (e.g. bipolar disorder) and depression caused by circumstance (situational depression). Often people have a mix of both, but the mix differs from person to person.
I tend towards situational depression. This means that when my situation improves, I tend to improve too. The way I see it, situational depression seems logical and obvious: we live in a pretty messed up world (what the Bible would call a post-Fall world). So of course there are going to be things that make us feel down. For example, the death of a close friend or a family member. Family or relationship breakdown. Troubles at work. Long-term unemployment. Post-traumatic stress from massive life events (like sexual assault). Personal failure. Comparing yourself to others—particular your peers—and wondering why you’re not where they are. Trump being in power. There’s a lot out there to be depressed about, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself affected by what’s going on in the world.
That said, how do you know if you’re depressed? There are common symptoms, but they can differ from person to person. Also, some of them can seem contradictory. For example, people who suffer from depression,
- Sleep too much or not enough;
- Eat too much or not enough/suffer from loss of appetite;
- Suffer from sluggish thoughts or find themselves unable to switch off from thinking too much;
- Experience a lack of sex drive or too much sex drive;
- Complain of lack of energy or too much energy (which is what the manic stage is like for those with bipolar).
Everyone’s depression looks different. If you suffer from depression, you need to work out what yours looks like.
Creativity and depression
There’s a myth out there that you need to be depressed in order to create great work. Creators like Agatha Christie, Leonard Cohen, Sylvia Plath and Stephen Fry suffered (or still suffer) from depression, so it must be true, or so the thinking goes. Certainly there are an awful lot of creative people out there who suffer from depression, and there definitely seems to be a link between creativity and mental illness. But sometimes I think creative people suffer from depression less because they are predisposed to it and more because of the nature of the work.
As a friend pointed out recently, creative professions are brutal. Creativity means opening yourself up and making yourself vulnerable, and what you make is often subjected to intense scrutiny and criticism, which can feel very personal. Furthermore, unlike other occupations like teaching, accounting, engineering or IT, creative careers are far from stable. There’s a lot at stake and a lot of pressure to succeed—particularly if you want to make a living from what you do. But there are no guarantees, and sometimes pursuing a creative career can feel like madness.
In a sense, depression is massively detrimental to creativity, because it can prevent you from creating at all. Imagine trying to do this sort of work when you’re suffering from low mood, low energy, lack of sleep and an inability to focus. Imagine trying to do this sort of work when you can’t even get out of bed, let alone put pencil to paper.
Furthermore, imagine trying to do this sort of work with a swarm of judgemental and self-critical thoughts swirling around your head—for example, “This has been done before”; “No one is going to like this”; “What will they think of me?”; “This sucks. I’m a failure. I will never amount to anything. This will never amount to anything”; “This is a waste of time. What’s the point?”; and “Why can’t I be more like ____? They’ve has already done this, this and this and they’re my age!”
Many creative people may suffer from depression. But in my opinion, depression doesn’t really aid creativity.
Making good art in the shadow of the black dog
No matter your circumstances (or your brain chemistry), you can still make good art even if you suffer from depression. But you need to treat your depression first.
Everyone—depression sufferer or no—should be taking steps to manage their mental health. (Especially men: sorry, guys, but you don’t have a particularly good track record of doing this!) But unfortunately this is something we are not taught how to do by our parents, our schools or even the medical profession. Nevertheless, it’s important because mental health affects so much of life. It starts with observation—regularly stepping back from your life and assessing how things are going and how you are going. How has your mood been? What things have been affecting it? (Think specifics—for example, work stress, lack of sleep, relational difficulties, where you are on your menstrual cycle. Sometimes it helps to write yourself a list, even if you destroy it later.) Do you think you might be suffering from depression? If so, what does your depression look like? The nature of your depression will determine how you treat it.
Note I said “treat”, not “cure”. Sometimes depression cannot be cured—or at least not completely. Instead, aim for being able to manage it. The better you are at managing it, the closer you will be to getting yourself to a place where you can create.
Now, some people who have problems with their brain chemistry may have to go on medication. Antidepressants can be very helpful tools for keeping things on an even keel. But not everyone needs to take pills to manage their depression—particularly if their depression is more up the situational end of the spectrum.
Try some of the following to boost your mood:
Related to the above, some of the unhelpful critical or judgemental thoughts common to creatives may need some serious cognitive behavioural therapy to reverse or transform them. For example,
- If you find yourself thinking, “I’m crap because I’m not doing as much as _____”, remember that your worth is not determined by your output—your word count or the number of pages you’ve managed to ink today. You are a valuable person in your own right. “Comparison is the thief of joy”, as one (or both!) of the Roosevelts is said to have said. Focus on what only you can do.
- If you find yourself thinking, “It’s been done before”, think to yourself, “That may be the case, but it hasn’t been done by me .” You are a unique individual: no one else in the world is like you. No one else has your viewpoint, your life history, your skills and your particular talent. So use what you have to do it your way.
- If you find yourself thinking, “This is a waste of time. I should just give up!”, don’t give up. Remember that nothing is a waste of time, because in creative work, everything is useful and nothing is wasted. Even if you have to scrap what you’ve just done, you’ve made progress, because you’ve figured out how not to do it. And that, therefore, means you’re closer to figuring out how it should be done. Remember that all progress is progress, no matter how small.
- If you find yourself thinking, “I haven’t done enough!”, remember to celebrate your wins. Write yourself a list if that helps. (Daniel Pink recommends doing something like this to round off each workday, even if you’re not in a creative profession.) You showed up! You wrote some words or drew a sketch! You figured out that plot point! You nailed that character nuance! Go you! You’re now a little bit closer to achieving your goal and finishing that project.
Once you’ve got a handle on your depression and are combatting the unhelpful thoughts, be sure to nurture yourself creatively. I’ve already talked about this in a previous newsletter in an article about “Creator medicine”, so I won’t go over that material again. But one thing that’s worth mentioning here is my point about talking to other creators about what they’re working on and how they like to work: sometimes just hanging around other creative people is enough to stimulate the creative juices again. (It brings to mind Proverbs 27:17: “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another”.) If that’s something that works for you, consider doing your creative work with someone else in order to foster accountability and encouragement. That’s something a couple of friends and I used to do—meet up once a week in a café to write. I found it helpful even on the days when I didn’t get much done.
Depression is hard. Creativity is hard. There are not shortcuts—no
foolproof cures. But depression can be managed, and creative work can be done in the midst of depression. And sometimes the work itself can be something of a mood booster—particularly when you’re in that zone when it feels less like work and more like play, and you’re doing it for the love of it, instead of because you have to. Creating for yourself is, I think, is the best antidepressant of all.
Oz Comic Con Sydney
Oz Comic Con Sydney took place on the long weekend just gone. It’s one of the biggest conventions, it’s the most expensive to table (when you consider the cost per day), and it’s the longest, with the show opening from 9am until 6pm each day. (Last year, when Oz Comic Con coincided with the start of Daylight Saving, things felt particularly brutal.) So doing Oz Comic Con was hard work and a big risk.
That said, I did enjoy the weekend, and my sales were solid enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. A convention is about more than sales and return on investment, however; they’re also about unquantifiable things like meeting new readers who picked up my work for the first time, catching up with existing readers (some of whom gave me some lovely feedback about Eternal Life, so thank you if that was you!), and, of course, talking to other creators—both people I met for the first time, old friends and old hands in the business who gave me helpful advice about a variety of things.
I decided to take matters into my own hands and organised a bunch of us to go out for dinner at a local restaurant after the show closed on the Saturday night. It was a lot of fun and I got to meet some new comic creators too. I think I’ll try to make this a regular thing as I really enjoy catching up with other comics people in a more social setting and it tends to make convention weekends that much more enjoyable. In addition, we usually finish up pretty early so I can still go home and relax a bit before the next day.
I only have one major event left for the year and that’s the Impact Comics Festival in Canberra on Saturday 13 October. I hope to see some of you there!
A few thoughts about Crazy Rich Asians
My friend Guan has already posted some of his reflections on Crazy Rich Asians and it made me want to write something too. So here are a few thoughts I had upon watching the film.
The last time I had dinner with my dad and stepmother, I asked them if they were going to see Crazy Rich Asians when it came out at the cinema.
“No,” they told me dismissively, then added, “Maybe we’ll see it if it’s showing on the airplane.”
The next week, they flew back to their home in China, and I wondered how they could be so flippant about such an important movie—a film that, as everyone keeps pointing out, is the first major Hollywood studio film to feature an all-Asian cast since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club.
But then I realised they live in a culture where they are constantly represented in all forms of media. Their everyday experience is seeing people who look like them on every screen, every newspaper and every magazine. In contrast, I (a banana—Canadian-born, raised primarily on Australian soil and very much a child of the West) struggle to count the number of times I have seen myself in western mainstream media.
It’s getting better, of course—and in recent years, I have really noticed the difference. But still, when I first watched the trailer for Crazy Rich Asians, I knew that this film marked a watershed moment. I posted the link on Facebook accompanied by this comment:
Still in shock. I’ve just never seen a Hollywood movie full of people who look like me.
A couple of weeks after that family dinner, I arranged to see the film with a couple of my Asian friends. When we turned up to the cinema, I was surprised to find that it was not only packed, it was packed full of mostly Asian people, and that only added to our viewing experience as we experienced the delights of Crazy Rich Asians together.
The film is a romcom, and as far as romcoms go, it has many of the standard tropes and plot devices—a beautiful, feisty yet clever heroine; a dreamy, handsome and rich love interest; friends and allies; enemies and frenemies; a disapproving mother; a makeover scene complete with fashion montage; a wedding (preceded by the requisite bachelor/bachelorette parties); and a last-minute race to the airport. But what elevates the stock content is the film’s cultural specificity—for example, the food (of course!) and the central place it occupies in family life; the metropolitan setting, moving from New York to Singapore to the island resorts; and the way that Michelle Yeoh’s character related to Constance Wu’s with all the weight of family, tradition, class and race behind her. Some of that cultural specificity went completely over my head (and I only knew I was missing it because I noticed Guan next to me, reacting to certain parts). But I didn’t mind because I could see the richness it was adding to the film.
Even though the story centred around the main couple, the cast worked as an ensemble, and you definitely got a sense of each of them. The more minor characters felt fleshed out and interesting. Furthermore, you never had trouble telling them apart—despite them all being, you know, all Asian. And they were different kinds of Asians too—not dragon ladies, martial artists, superheroes or simple villagers, but everyday individuals with their own quirks and foibles.
In addition, for a romcom, it was surprisingly frank about marriage and relationships, and the challenges that surround them. There’s romance, definitely: you understand what Nick and Rachel see in each other and why they are together. But the script shows they know that it’s not just happily ever after; the other characters act as foils, highlighting this—particularly Astrid’s B-plot, but also, to a certain extent, Nick’s mother too (the scenes with her mother-in-law are especially telling). And it’s all done very economically.
That said, the thing that probably resonated the most for me—and it’s something that wouldn’t have resonated for a Western audience or even an Eastern one, for that matter—is that Crazy Rich Asians completely nailed what it’s like to look like someone from a particular dominant culture, but to be treated as though you are not—because you are not rich enough, you are not Asian enough (or you’re the wrong sort of Asian; at one point, Michelle Yeoh’s character says of Rachel, “Yes, but she’s Chinese American!”), you’ve had the wrong sort of education, you’ve been raised in the wrong sort of culture, you married the wrong sort of person (or the wrong sort of Asian person), or you don’t speak the right language. And for that, you are made to feel “other”—like you don’t belong—and you will never belong. The movie speaks to the Asian American experience, yes, but I dare say it also speaks to the experience of every child of Asian immigrant parents throughout the world. It certainly spoke to mine.
Crazy Rich Asians is by no means a perfect movie. But it’s an important movie for our times. Listen to the cast talk about what the movie means to them (7:01 min):
What is making me happy
In the spirit of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, here are a few of the things that have been making me happy lately:
- TV show and comics: Hilda (comics by Luke Pearson; also screening on Netflix): In 2013, I met Luke Pearson at the GRAPHIC festival, when he, along with Sam Arthur of Nobrow Press, were special guests. (Nobrow publishes Hilda.) I bought the first two Hilda books from him then and got them signed them for my eldest, who was only three at the time. When she was a bit older, we started reading them together, and now she is impatiently waiting for the next book because the last one ended on a cliffhanger. The Hilda stories are delightful and charming—about a plucky and kind little girl who goes about having adventures and helping the interesting creatures she encounters. If I could, I would give copies to every child in the world. Now I’m absolutely delighted we have a Hilda TV show, and my girls and I have been enjoying it together. (FYI Hilda is voiced by Bella Ramsey, who plays Lyanna Mormont in “Game of Thrones” and the theme song is by Grimes.)
- Movie: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (Netflix): This is based on a popular YA book by Jenny Han that I have not read. Netflix now recommends me romcoms, so when this one came up, I was interested. Then it started getting good reviews on Twitter. It’s a teen romance with an Asian heroine who’s introverted and hugely bookish, and it’s massively cute and sweet at the same time. I thought the script did an excellent job of building the relationship between the main leads, and those ended up being some of my favourite scenes in the movie.
- Comics: Zita the Spacegirl (Ben Hatke): I came to Ben Hatke’s work through Mighty Jack, his quirky and wonderful sort of retelling of “Jack and the Beanstalk” (which I also highly recommend; he does some wonderful and economical character work). But Zita came first in his bibliography. Like Hilda, Zita is courageous, plucky and, well, good. But Hatke really makes you feel for her by throwing her into this outrageous situations where the stakes are high and the landscape is bleak.
- Article: “Everything you know about obesity is wrong” (Huffington Post Highline): This is a really helpful corrective to some of the mainstream thinking there around weight and body image. It also shows how appallingly some people have been treated by people in the medical profession. Here’s an excerpt:
The most effective health interventions aren’t actually health interventions—they are policies that ease the hardship of poverty and free up time for movement and play and parenting. Developing countries with higher wages for women have lower obesity rates, and lives are transformed when healthy food is made cheaper. A pilot program in Massachusetts that gave food stamp recipients an extra 30 cents for every $1 they spent on healthy food increased fruit and vegetable consumption by 26 percent. Policies like this are unlikely to affect our weight. They are almost certain, however, to significantly improve our health.
- My new cardigan: Ages ago, my mum gave me a cardigan she no longer wanted. I really liked the cut of it, but it’s not very warm because it’s made of polyester and cotton. So I thought I would reverse engineer it and knit it in wool. That required a fair bit of swatching and maths, but I think I managed to do it. Obviously it doesn’t have the same drape to it as the fibre is different, and the rib pattern is not the same because I couldn’t replicate it in wool (it seems to rely on a double wrap stitch that just doesn’t work with wool). Plus I added a button. But I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and I already love wearing it.
- The Single Minded Conference : A Christian conference about singleness for everyone: There were two other events happening that day—the Manly Zine Fair and the Zine There, Done That Zine Fair (which also had a Read to Me event in the afternoon that I’m still sad I missed). But I had registered for this conference way in advance of both events, and I was really glad I went as it was a
terrific day of helpful talks about marriage, singleness and church by Sam Allberry (a UK pastor who has been helpfully outspoken about being Christian, same-sex attracted and celibate. He also wrote Is God Anti-Gay? ) and a host of others. In the afternoon, I attended seminars on biblical friendship (which drew my attention to how much the Book of Proverbs talks about friendship—something I had never thought about before), and how to love and care for single people in your church. I hope the talks go online sometime as they are well worth a listen.
- Podcast: The Garret: interviews with writers about writing. The one with Shaun Tan is so good: in it, he talks about his process, how his writing and his art feed into one another, and what he did to make The Arrival (50:17 min). I love this bit about comics:
Comics are like the best of independent filmmaking, basically. It’s like you can make a movie with all the subtleties that you see in cinema without all the things that will interfere with its creation because it’s just you, a table and a whole lot of time.
- YouTube clip: Lioz Shem Tov on America’s Got Talent: I did not know that comedy magic was a thing, but he totally makes it one. This is his audition (4:58 min) and this is the round where he was cut (4:59 min).
Upcoming events
Thank you again for your interest and support!
More soon.
Karen Beilharz
Hivemindedness Media
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