All in Good Time

I have been very quiet over the past year. In both my business and my local community, I haven't been doing as much as I used to. People talk to me me when I'm out and about, "I haven't seen you in a while, I missed you. How are you going?" Sometimes I want to cower and go back home, but I try to be as open as possible. I have been very mentally unwell for the past year, and I haven't been able to do all the things I used to.

I often see the parallels between my life and my garden. Season come and go, but you always know they will be back again. The little tomato seedling poke their seed leaves up above the dirt every spring, they reach to the sky and produce beautiful clusters of yellow flowers ready for the blue banded bees, I fight the bugs to get the delicious harvest, then in autumn they always turn a crisp brown and die. Year after year, the same process with slight variations. Some plants live for a long time, slowly growing year after year, others only last a season. There is a repetitive ebb and flow to it all that I find comforting.

I have a very variable disability, so my life is very much the same. Times of health and times of heartache come and go, and I don't get much say about when they occur. I can feel the start of a slippery slope downwards, but these days, I am sometimes comforted by the fact that I know there will be the steady climb back up after a few months. I can't predict how long the bad times will last, but I also can't predict the same for the good. The only certainty is that things will come and go, ebb and flow.

Growing up, I always thought that all grownups worked 9am to 5pm every Monday to Friday. I thought that they all put in the same amount of effort every day and that this was how everyone functioned. I was terrified, because every time I have tried to push my brain to do that, things have exploded in a spectacular fashion - crises that have landed me in hospital on more than one occasion. There is an expectation of uniformity that seeps into so many aspects of everyday life. Along the way I have learnt a secret: no one fits that uniformity.

I used to think that if I just pushed myself further, I could be more consistent. Maybe if I pushed through the exhaustion, if I just painting and wrote every single day of the year, my art would exponentially improve, but that isn't the way my body and brain work. I'm learning every day how to recognise the good days and the bad. On the good days, I know I can push myself, but on the bad days, I am learning to let go and just get the bare minimum complete. There will be a good day again in the future, just like there will always be more tomato plants next summer.

I've made almost no art over the past six months. I've knit some socks, learnt how to tablet weave and how to process raw sheep fleece, but its been a struggle to get even that done. I am alive, I am surviving the hard days, and there will be days full of watercolours and writing to come.