Spiritual Liberation Through Creation

Everyone in life faces some type of stress and pressure whether it be from their job, their family, the world, or even their selves. These stresses and difficult times can be shared by many or by few and bring people together, but the true beauty that can be found in it all lies within how we persevere through it. The struggles and stress are not always fun and, in most cases, can be emotionally and physically draining but when we use our stress and struggles and express it in other outlets, the outcome can be beautiful.

With this, I am not just referring to the physical pieces of the work or the outcome, but the meaning behind it and the relief that comes with freeing ourselves of our stress and worries even if it is temporary. There are many forms that this can take, my own forms of stress relief tend to fall into a more athletic and creative way, but I am constantly trying to find and try new ideas. Growing up my stress and mental health was basically one thing and were handled as one. If I was stressed or having an outburst, I was told to do jumping jacks, which then started my involvement in sports. I joined cheerleading, went for runs, or played basketball to keep everything at bay.

The root of it all was that I was never taught that my mental health and stress were two different things. And my family, not necessarily knowing how to manage or understand their own stress and mental health, were not able to properly help me do so with my own. In high school, I started to acknowledge that the two were different things, but instead of handling it positively, I used one to battle the other. My ideology then was if I did more and was involved in everything then I would never have time to think or have outbursts. I was basically keeping my mental health at bay by being overly stressed. And in a way, it worked for me throughout all of high school, but it was a temporary fix that when I graduated and started college, especially in the middle of the pandemic, just was not working anymore and left me in a downward spiral for months because I really didn’t know how to handle and acknowledge my stress and mental health. During this time, I started to acknowledge everything from the fact that I do have limits of what I can handle and that not acknowledging them is not helping me.

After this, I started to try new things that I thought would help me manage my mental health and relieve my stress. I started doing yoga, meditation, brain dumping in journals, reading more books, listening to music, and painting. The ones that really stuck with me and felt the most liberating was listening to music and painting. Music is filled with so many meanings and emotions, and I would listen to whatever I could connect to at that moment and then express it all in my paintings. When painting I don’t hold myself to any expectations, there are no boundaries on what I can create, and in doing so I free everything that is bottled up. I also like to keep every piece of art and write blurbs in a journal about what I was feeling during it, and I think it really adds to the work and allows me to later reflect on it when I am no longer feeling that way.

This process also increases my creativity, and I tend to get a lot of ideas and inspiration for my writing. After I paint and free myself of all my stress, I am relaxed and have a clear head that allows me as a writer to produce higher-level work. For this reason, after I paint and go through that process I tend to transition to writing and will start writing down any ideas or inspiration I got when painting. Then I will either work from those or continue a piece of work I already started. This process overall allows me to free myself of my stress and helps me manage my mental health in such a way that they are no longer an obstacle in my daily life. It also helps fuel my creativity and allows me to produce work that I can be proud of even more so now because the inspiration and ideas were born from such a raw and once destructive place and now can be turned into something beautiful.