So you’re writing. Or painting. Or dancing. And you’re struck by this horrible feeling: what am I doing? How am I ever going to find the form and create something beautiful out of this tangled mess that I’ve assembled? Or you start to feel that your work doesn’t matter. That in fact, nothing matters. Your creative endeavors amount to nothing. You are nothing. Nothing’s worth saying. No creative project’s worth doing. And that, friends, is existential despair. It happens. Most people involved in creative projects experience this state at some point, and it can be tough to get out of. In this episode, we wonder, can we avoid it? What do we miss if we avoid it? What helps us to return to a sense of purpose and passion? Our special guest, encaustic/mixed media artist Andrea Bird from Ontario, Canada, joins us for our game of two questions and talks about how that grappling can actually be what helps push our work to the next level.
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This is your body on existential despair … best thing to do is get away from the writing desk, into the sunshine, preferably on skis.
Episode Notes
Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet
Good to Go, Christie’s book on the science of sports recovery
A Hundred Falling Veils, Rosemerry’s daily poem blog
Andrea Bird’s gallery
Episode 3: Existential Despair (with guest Andrea Bird)