what keeps you sane?

While my work is primarily a form of learning and self-expression, it is also the thing that keeps me sane. The entire process, from inspiration and production to post-production, helps keep me engaged with the things that make me happy. From finding references to figuring out the right clothes, hair and make-up, each step boosts my mood. Whenever I feel uninspired, creating brings a sense of reinvigoration and calm, and with every new image I work on, the world starts to feel right again.

When was the last time you did nothing? No, think about this. Really nothing. Not an annual leave day as mandated by HR for your birthday. Not binge watching New Girl for the fifth time because you’re hung over on a Sunday. Not scrolling mindlessly between the hours of 9am to 1pm because you have a dentist appointment at 2pm or a flight at 4 and you can’t relax properly until that task is completed. When was the last time you decided not to do anything, without apologies? When was the last time you enjoyed the rot?

I suspect it is harder to think of an actual time you did this. We’re not supposed to be lazy. We’re not supposed to do nothing. Women are supposed to be clean girls, girlbosses, ambitious, active, social, productive, wholesome, healthy, beautiful. Men are supposed to be industrious, strong, motivated, alpha, little Steven Bartletts. We are expected to do these things consistently and effortlessly and to not reveal to the world that they take up huge amounts of time and are quite tedious and also tiring.

I feel like jealousy is a really big game-stopper: jealousy amongst family, coworkers, friends. Work as an artist, it waxes and wanes. My relationship with the downtime has changed a lot over the years. I call that when you’re in a liminal phase. You are gathering, you’re hunting, you are having a good time. You are not killing yourself or beating yourself up for it being slow. A lot of people go to really bad places when things slow down. I try not to do that; it is a waste of time.

It is only the abandonment of this expectation that keeps me sane.

A necessary caveat – doing nothing is a privilege. Most of us have to work, have to pay our bills, have to collect our meds and commute to work and smile when we get there. I’m not talking about abandoning this expectation and going to live off-grid entirely, like one of those beautiful but clearly malevolently insane white couples  with dreadlocks who populate your FYP talking about how they’re receiving spiritual messages from the pyramids of Giza. When I think of what keeps me sane, day to day, week to week, month to month, it’s not the productivity or the accomplishments I can look back on in December for one of those tedious “things I did this year” Instagram posts currently in vogue. It’s the grey spaces in between the achievements and the travels and the birthday parties and weddings, the time in which I was lying prostrate on my sofa watching YouTubers play The Sims.

In the media, this behaviour – slovenliness, laziness – has become shorthand for depression. To lie around without thoughts or activity has become an easy way for creators, filmmakers especially, to communicate that a girl is Not Having A Good Time. Perhaps she’s in a T-shirt with no bra and a pair of tiny pants. Perhaps her boyfriend has just broken up with her. Perhaps she will order Chinese takeaway in those funny little boxes and they will be delivered to her by a sympathetic Deliveroo driver. Soon she will overcome this, have a makeover, wash her hair and get up before 10am. Soon she will be happier. Because how could you realistically be happy if you weren’t out in the world, being beautiful and doing important things? It’s worth noting there is no male equivalent to this trope, because the men are the ones creating it.

The ideal woman is always supposed to be optimising herself. Jia Tolentino says as much in an essay of the same name, taken from her 2019 book Trick Mirror. It unpacks the “tyranny of the ideal woman”, the performance of spontaneity whilst being in the constant pursuit of meticulous and mundane improvement. “Figuring out how to ‘get better’ at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project,” she argues, “a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.”

I was stuck on the shielding list during lockdown, which meant I was stuck inside for nearly three months straight, and was ravenous for a return to my previously hectic, fast-paced life. As soon as I was vaccinated, then, I was back out into the world. I was working more, drinking more, socialising more, spending (much) more, doing everything I couldn’t do beforehand. And then, perhaps unsurprisingly, I crashed. I was one of the wave of millennial and zoomers suffering from that buzzy term: burnout.

More of us are burnt out than ever. Research published in February this year showed that rates of burnout had jumped from 38 percent in 2023 to 42 percent. Social media trends began to reflect it too. “Rot girl summer” was the definitive TikTok trend last year, and this year “lazy girl job” has replaced it. A Gallup survey found that 33 percent of women are burnt out this year, compared to 25 percent of men, and are looking to yeet out of the rat race.

So to deal with it I indulge in pockets of nothingness, to stave off the exhaustion and embrace my inner “lazy girl”, as patrician and diminutive the term might be. I lie prostrate on the sofa watching YouTube videos of people reviewing soap before cutting them into strips. I spend hours losing myself in TikTok influencer drama between people I neither know nor care about. I play a game on my phone that I’ve been playing for the past 12 years, where I help a cartoon butler renovate his parents’ dilapidated mansion (incidentally over the past decade, as female burnout has risen, the rise of female gamers have too – from 38 percent of players identifying as women in 2006 to 41 percent in 2020).

None of these things are useful or wholesome or helpful or productive. I do them and I sit outside myself, not caring about what I look like doing it, or how someone else might think of me for being lazy. I do nothing. I remain (relatively) sane. And then I get up for work in the morning to do it all again.

I am stuck with this quote of Francesco Clemente, who says ‘Art is the irresistible wish to leave.’ And I come to understand why it is so important for us to arrive somewhere. By running Casa Lollo, an artists’ residency dedicated to creative expression about environmental protection and mental health in the north of Italy, it enables me to connect with others through our shared vulnerability and honesty. That is when sanity kicks in for me.

Hanging out with kids keeps me sane. Kids are a real improv crash course, so you are kept on your toes. Gotta stay sharp! They are not jaded, we eat the same foods, no putting on airs, all truth and laughs for days.

I love meeting people, connecting and hearing their stories, which I have the privilege of exploring through my podcast, I am Fine, which is about pain: all kinds of pain that we keep quiet about. It is about redefining the narrative of pain in our lives, discovering mind-body methods for moving beyond it and accessing possibility, positivity and productivity to find our power. It is important to be reminded that none of us are alone, but that depends on ensuring that we are not isolating ourselves. It is also important to focus on cultivating an inner sense of peace, because you can not give what you do not have. Meditation has been so freeing for me, as it has given relief from the physical pain and the fear it can induce.

Art, for me, is a spiritual practice and a meditation on mindfulness. Drawing, specifically, brings me a sense of freedom and grounding. It serves many functions for me, including journalling, organising and abstraction. When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in my early twenties, I used drawing as a way to process and express that experience. For me, the drawings opened up a new realm of possibilities by embracing my complexities and recognising my vulnerability and sensitivity as sources of power.

My paintings started with an idea that I had on a Greyhound bus in Arizona at dawn. I decided to make a devotional oil painting of the desert, wondering what would happen if you transposed Northern Renaissance-style nudes into the New Frontier, the landscapes and streets of the American Southwest. The only problem was that I had to completely teach myself how to draw and paint. It was a long journey of sleepless nights, but doing this presented a new and different way of seeing the world and its endless detail. Any surrounding, object, or part of anatomy can become quite sacred when you take in its patterns and forms, translating everything by hand. And that is sanity inducing, for sure.

Honestly, the word mindful was only brought to my attention recently, so I am still figuring it all out. Having a purpose in this world helps me to remain sane and navigate my way through the ups and downs; it normalises me so that when everything around me is moving I can find some stillness. When I doubt myself I remember my purpose and why I am on Earth and the doubt goes. It has helped a lot. Also family are true and speak to a part of your soul nothing else can. They keep me sane too, which helps because they drive me crazy most times. But there is nothing else like it. Even if it is the family you made yourself.

I really treasure some me time pottering in the garden. Gardening is a solitary, almost meditative experience for me. I can sow seeds, trim roses or just play ball with my dog, Stanley. The slowing down of time, where everything is dialled down, brings me into the present. It is a great skill to have, to find a moment where you are only focused on what you are doing right there and then. I find it is the perfect antidote to my busy work schedule, where I am working with lots of people. (The flowers do not talk back!) In the garden, time passes how it should, the seasons unfold slowly right in front of my eyes. And nose.

Remembering to breathe, my friends, time to myself, a good amount of science, a good cry, other peoples stories, remembering everything that came before me, warm memories. They do not always succeed but I am thankful to all of them.

Comedy keeps me sane. My trauma response is to laugh.

Nature keeps me sane. Living in an urban ecosystem, I do everything I can to remind myself that she is not so far away. Some days, that is reading in the park by my favourite willow sapling that I have been watching grow over the years. On other days, it is sitting for tea, meditating on the leaves the earth grew, the water she gave. And sometimes it is studying ecology: reading about the wonders that might not be in front of me, but are no less real. When the world feels overwhelming, I feel grounded by how much remains to protect and inspire us.