The other day I was mentally describing myself to myself. I assume this is totally normal behavior for everyone.
Specifically I was trying to put into words the way that I transitioned from being an aspiring artist, to being an artist. How I escaped that period in my early 20s when I wanted to make art but couldn't, to now in my 30s when I make art all the time. As I'm doing this, mentally trying words on for size, the sentence "I started making art to work through my depression." came into my head, and it irritated me. I fucking hate when people say shit like that, and here I was thinking it with my own brain thoughts. Worse: it was kinda true.
A frequent refrain among artists who've "made it," (a club of which I am not a member) is that they used their art to work through something bad. That their art is fueled by anxiety, depression, anger, or trauma. When I was a kid looking for answers, trying to figure out why I couldn't make myself do the things I wanted to do, that stock explanation made me feel deficient. Art is, and always has been, work for me. It's good work, but it's work. When I feel depressed or anxious I go looking for comfort, not expression. I can't imagine being in the midst of a depressive episode and finding the motivation to work my feelings out through a novel. And because I could not feel that way when so many other people said they did, I felt that perhaps it was not possible for me to be an artist. That it required a brain chemistry that worked differently from mine.
Now, though, I make a lot of art. I am comfortable asserting that I'm an artist, and I must technically admit that "I made art to work through my depression" is technically accurate, but also a completely inadequate explanation of what happened.
One of the darkest periods of my life was right after I managed to get my life together. Before that my life was a nightmare. 2008-2010 I had no job, no food, was forced to drop out of school, to move in with my parents, endure abuse, eventually get a shitty job, and broke up with my partner. Near the end I got a different shitty job that paid me a living wage, and managed to moveinto a shitty apartment. Those years were about survival. They were terrible, and left lasting scars on my psyche, but the one thing I had was a clear goal. I needed to fix my life.
By November of 2010, I had done it. My life was stable. I had a miserable job that paid a living wage, and an apartment that ought to have been condemned. Life fixed. Box checked. It wasn't a great life, but after the previous 2 years it was the furthest I had allowed myself to dream. Having got there, I was left feeling empty. I'd get home from work every day and do nothing. There didn't seem to be anything to do. I had no goals. I did not conceive of myself as depressed. I wasn't aware of myself enough to recognize that my life had lost structure and I was drifting. If I'd known that stuff I might havebeen able to pick some goals. Instead I languished in that state for about a year.
Eventually I started a blog. I made a strong comittment to it, almost on a whim. It felt good when I met those comittments, and feeling good propelled me to make more comittments that I clung to with fervor. For a good chunk of time my blog's schedule was the most important piece of structure in my life. That's not a super healthy way to live, but I didn't realize that structure was something I was looking for. I didn't know why my schedule was so important to me. It just was.
Over several years that structure chipped away at my depression. Each piece of writing I produced was a minor triumph, and after hundreds of minor triumphs they started to feel normal in the best way. I wasn't overcoming my ineptitude to produce a single piece of writing anymore. I was a writer. I'd established a pattern of success for myself, and that was a huge part of pulling myself out of depression. It was far from the only part, mind you. My growing financial and social stability was also a factor—but those in turn were fed by the fact that I had writing. Doing interesting things meant I had more to offer potential friends, and so my social connections grew stronger.
Only in retrospect do I see how depression drove me to cling to writing the way I did. It drove me to produce a lot of work, but I never got any writing done on my worst days. I still don't. And as the years have passed, and my depression has gotten more under control, my work has only improved because of it. Depression never improved my art. Depression was trying to pull me under, and art was a life preserver that kept me afloat.
—Nick LS Whelan
January 9, 2022