Your Help?
I wouldn't presume to give advice, except of the vague 'Don't do as I have done ... ' variety, which is next to useless.
I would wish ~m the same as I would wish myself - the facility to relax and enjoy creativity for its own sake, the ability to share its fruits with others (if we so desire) without a feeling of pressure or expectation.
Artistic/creative expression, I believe, has the potential to help us out of our mire (I speak for myself here) but, as depressed people, we have the world-class talent of making any possible solution into part of the problem. Indeed, for myself, that is a familiar and almost comfortable thing to do. As I said earlier, failure on my own terms without risk or exposure.
Of course, even seeing creative endeavour in terms of success or failure could be seen as an error, but I, for one, am so conditioned to see everything in those terms that it is difficult not to.
If only I could just sit and write in a relaxed way, for the pleasure of it. Part of the reason I quit my writing class was that each week we would have an assignment set by the tutor, designed to stretch and expand our skills. I would worry and worry about what/how to write it. It felt like getting blood from a particularly recalcitrant stone. Eventually I would get something written and , hey presto, it would be praised. But I found the weekly pressure too much, and thought that if I quit the class I would be able to just write for fun, without the stress of living up to the praise. I always felt that anything good that I wrote came about by accident, that I was fooling everyone, and could not really write at all. What happened when I stopped the class was that I simply stopped writing - without the deadline to do it, I just didn't, but with the deadline it was making me unhappy and obsessive. Conundrum.
See what I mean about the solution becoming the problem?
Oh, if only that man standing in my way would not complicate everything so much......
