I'm just really f**kin tired: On healing, rest, and breaks
Allow your body to rest before it forces itself to heal
Hello and, despite us coming to the end of Ramadan, happy Ramadan to my subscribers and I hope you’ve had a blessed month. Many new names ever since being a guest on the wonderful Basma’s podcast (you can listen to the episode here) so that’s a nice thing to come back to. Welcome to my corner of the internet, where everything leads back to art.
So, Ramadan was a month where I took a break [that was not accounted for] from what I could take a break from. Meaning everything but my actual day job except the 2 days where the flu struck me down, but otherwise I’ve been a valuable contributor. The funny thing is, I never realized that I took a break until I realized one Ramadan morning that I haven’t posted on the newsletter in April at all. The writing weighed heavy on me, I wasn’t motivated to finish any artwork, nor do anything fun for that matter. I wanted nothing more than to hibernate and wakeup whenever this hypothetical winter is over. Whether that hypothetical winter was Ramadan or simply a stressful time period that intersected with Ramadan of this year.
This Ramadan has been eeriely reminiscent of last summer, a summer that was tumultuous and paralyzing, health-wise. I lost a lot of my sense of self that summer, but I also lost an asset I took for granted, my health. This Ramadan was a trailer to the movie I already saw last summer; a movie titled “Allow your body to rest before it forces itself to heal”.
This particular title was a conclusion I made a long time after the events of last summer, and every time I threaten my health mostly by losing track of it or lacking awareness of it in the face of a particular set of events or obligations especially in relation to my growth. I remember how I did not let my body get its rest, or took proper care of it, in order to be better equipped to cope with the ebb and the flow of life. My body does the equivalent of a forced restart when you postpone the computer update for too long.
That time was a necessary evil for me, I never was cognizant of how important rest is especially in the face of growth, given it was a time I was seeing a lot of growth for myself. That time forced me to heal, and was what I needed to not take my health for granted; something a large group of people is guilty of, whether they are aware of it or not.
Rest isn’t just sleeping for an insane number of hours for a week straight and going back to work the next week. It is a conscious effort to unplug or regulate stressors in whatever capacity you can and that looks different to each one of us. It is a time, whether that’s an hour or a week, where the majority of that given time is made up of things that you enjoy and are necessary to your healing. It is also important to be aware that for certain people or at certain times a complete detachment from obligations and stress can be a luxury, so a conscious break in this case would look different than a weekend getaway or even a week of just seeing friends. The common theme for a break in however way you can take it, based on interest, capacity, or ability, is detaching yourself and looking inwards and giving your body what it needs, not just what you want. The accumulation of stress and chaos is what sets you into forced healing mode.
With that being said, being an artist comes with its health risks.
While art has long been a tool for therapy, once that practice intersects with a stressor and becomes an obligation it becomes something that eats away at the artist and eventually might become something you’d seek therapy from. The framing of art as a luxury or a nice-to-have has made a great deal of artists prioritize the need to prove their art’s necessity in the face of [mainly] capitalism and social pressures and have their wellbeing take a back seat in fear of losing opportunities to create. That could send an artist into an ugly spiral, kind of like what happened to Yannoulis Chalepas.
Yannoulis Chalepas is a Greek sculptor that was born to a family of marble cutters and went to school for art as well as received mentorship from great neoclassical sculptors in his time. His work was recognized for being mature quite early on in his artistic career and was characterized by the exceptional way in which the doctrines of neoclassicism are used. Chalepas is mainly known Sleeping Female Figure which was placed on the tomb of Sophia Afentaki at the First Cemetery of Athens.
At the age of 37, Chalepas faced a whirlpool of mental health issues. Those issues were triggered by his perfectionist tendencies, overworking, and rejection. He could not cope with the stressors so he broke down. He proceeded to destroy his work and attempted suicide a few times, and in reaction to that his family sent him to Italy to recover. When he got back, he was only better temporarily before he was significantly worse. As a result, he was admitted into a mental hospital that prevented him from practicing for 14 years. Not only that, but after his release his mother blamed his detreorating health on his art and did not allow him to practice.
Following his mother’s death, Chalepas period of his art labelled “post-sanity” that was split into 2 phases. While Chalepas’s earlier art was described as exhibiting a rare maturity from a young artist, his post-sanity artwork was reclaiming his practice from years of turmoil, it was his way of making up for lost time. His mind and body were healing from stress no break would equip him for, but it was his way of trying to find solid ground again and he practiced sculpting until his death.
So is this saying that if early on Chalepas has “taken a break” he wouldn’t have lost all of those years out of practice? No. What Chalepas has gone through was a misfortune of human life that would strike you even if you’re unplugging or resting, Chalepas had to heal to know rest. What Chalepas could have had in his rehabilitation years were the tools that would allow him to heal, and then rest. I would say he was discovering that in his later years. Healing from his past, so he can rest during his present.
Remember to take of yourself in whatever capacity you can, don’t let the human condition catch up to you if you can help it. Work with it, not against it.
Signed,
Sarah