Issue #100 On Losing Part of Yourself

The story of losing my creativity and the quest to get it back

Wowzers! Issue #100. That’s a lot of issues of The Digest - thank you to all those that have stuck around since the very beginning. In this issue I want to reveal the mildly harrowing story behind my decision to try and write something every week and why it matters so much that I’ve been able to keep going.

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It begins six years ago, we were still living in the woods and Benji was only a few years old. Although there were a lot of good things happening at that time, it was also a difficult period as we grappled with the challenges of making a living as a self-employed creative couple, running a struggling business, working in the woods and raising a young wild child. I had to write a fair bit back then: posts for our blog, an occasional piece for a magazine, answers to interview questions. I can’t say I was ever good at writing, but when you do something a lot, it becomes easier.

One day, I was writing a piece for our blog - I can’t remember exactly what it was about, but I remember it was unusually hard. I was upstairs in our little barn in the woods, working on my laptop in front of the big window that overlooked the land we looked after. Emma was downstairs working on something else whilst our son Benji was being looked after by my folks. This was our one day of the week where we had childcare, enabling us to work on things that required a little peace and quiet.

Looking out the window of our old home

I was trying to write, but for some reason the words wouldn’t come. Nothing.

My vision was suddenly blurred in one eye and words were not only not coming, they were suddenly jumbled, garbled on the page and in my mind. I tried to shake it off, tell myself to snap out of it, but even my inner monolog was garbled. I was thinking backwards. I tried to speak but couldn’t. Words were coming out in reverse. Stumbling downstairs in panic mode, I tried to tell Emma what was happening - just a tangled mess of vowels and consonants came out. With huge effort, I managed to get two words to come out in the right order. “Can’t. Speak.”

Emma got me in the car and we drove to the hospital - on the journey my right arm and hand started to go numb and my lips and tongue fizzed. We debated stopping and phoning for an ambulance, but driving would be quicker. All I could think about was Benji.

I was rushed into triage in A&E and bombarded with questions that I couldn’t answer, my words still backwards and tangled. I remember the effort it took to recall words in my mind and the struggle to get them to come out. Singular words were all I could manage and my head throbbed. I had tests and scans. Gradually the trauma subsided and words started to make sense again, slowly but surely, the fog was lifting. I was eventually allowed to leave, but I was scared and not sure I wanted to go home. My head was dull and sore, like a terrible hangover.

A couple of days later, I was back in hospital for more scans and tests to try and find out what had caused my little episode. The best guess was a TIA or mini stroke. I usually hate going to hospitals, or even to the doctors. If I can avoid it I will. But on this occasion I remember being so comforted to be there. To be looked after and cared for. I had MRI tests and blood tests and they checked to see if the arteries in my neck were clogged. I met neurologists and stroke specialists and eventually was given the diagnosis that no one wants: they weren’t really sure. It could have been a mini stroke, or it could have been a very rare type of migraine. Great.

When you leave hospital, you just want to know what’s wrong with you, so you can deal with whatever it is and work towards getting better. But I left not knowing what happened, and not knowing if it would happen again.

For a long while, my confidence was shaken. What if it happened again while working in the woods on my own? Or when we were hiking in the Swedish wilderness?

After a while, you forget about such things. My confidence slowly came back. But what didn’t come back so easily was my creativity. In the immediate aftermath, simple creative tasks had become major struggles. Writing anything was difficult. I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to write a birthday card. Even worse, I had lost the ability to draw - not good news for an illustrator. I could not physically get the pen to go where I wanted it to. I couldn’t even draw a circle - the start and finish points of my line would not meet. It was like trying to draw with my eyes closed. I remember the frustration, the feeling of wanting to cry. My whole life I’d worked at becoming an illustrator and now I couldn’t draw? Benji would ask me to draw with him and I’d try, but my mind was a desert, bereft of ideas. My brain, it felt, was broken.

Thinking about it now, I probably should have tried to get help. At the time we were focused on the creative studio of Miscellaneous Adventures, and most of our income came from design and illustration commissions alongside a little from our online store. Needless to say, work was a struggle. We had to turn down creative projects and I leaned into practical work to try and make ends meet. It’s incredibly easy to slip into financial difficulty, less easy to claw your way out. In truth, we are still trying. Of course, the added stress of falling into debt does not provide fertile ground for creativity to flourish; I started to let go of the creative part of the person I was. In case you’ve never experienced it, it is heartbreaking to watch a part of yourself drift away.

For a long while we struggled through. I couldn’t draw or write, but photography gave me a creative outlet and I could still make things with my hands, although everything was harder than it used to be. I took on more practical work and leaned into conservation contracting. Partly in defiance but also partly because you just have to carry on, we took on a few creative projects that come our way and between the two of us we muddled through. There were occasional flashes of creativity, as if synapses were trying to fire, but they were never reliable or long lived.

As I go through this in my mind now, I wonder how we made it through. But you just do I guess, what choice do you have? Our resilience was in the fact that we could turn our hands to many things and in the fact that we didn’t much care about not having any money.

Fast forward to November 2022 - after 11 years of living in the woods, we moved north to the mountains and valleys of the Lake District. We had thought about moving here for years, and now we were finally doing it. I had been offered a job looking after a woodland estate and although I had many misgivings about working for someone else and what felt like giving up on our creative endeavours for good, it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

At first it was fine. It was kind of nice to not be working for myself for once - to not have to self initiate all the time or juggle multiple projects at a time. But soon, I began to miss my old creative self. The work itself was interesting, I was using many of the skills I’d accumulated whilst living in the woods: Making things with my hands using traditional methods, studying and recording plants and wildlife. And of course we’d just moved to the mountains, exploring new places and having adventures every weekend. I had lots to document and process, my mind a jumble of words and ideas. I decided to start writing again. A simple journal of the things we were doing and places we were going. I wouldn’t worry over whether the writing was any good or not, I would just write for myself. I knew it was going to be hard though, so by way of setting my intention I committed to writing once a week and sharing it via our small newsletter community (hello!).

It was tough to begin with. Not only was I coping with the lingering effects of whatever happened to my brain that day, but I had also developed a fear of writing - a fear of triggering a repeat episode. It took me a whole week to write my first post despite its brief nature, but I did it. Hitting the publish button and sending it out into the world somehow made it more real and I was encouraged enough by my success to keep going.

100 posts later I can’t quite believe I managed it. It has been tough at times, with various meltdowns along the way and sure, I’ve missed a few weeks here and there. Sometimes it still feels like my brain is being squeezed in a vice when I write, but over time it has become easier, enjoyable almost. I’m no Mary Oliver, but I think I’ve got better at it too - most importantly it has become easier to access and unravel the tangle of thoughts. I’ve managed to get part of myself back.

But what about drawing? Well, it’s a work in progress. I can pretty much steer a pen in the right direction again, but ideas take more percolation than they used to. My skill as an illustrator was never in technical drawing ability, but in conceptual and sideways thinking and I don’t know if I’ll ever get that part of myself back completely.

A few recent sketchbook pages

Someone asked me recently if I was satisfied creatively. Given everything that’s happened, I found that an incredibly difficult question to answer. Over time, and in coming to terms with the loss of some of creative ability, I think I’ve figured out that being creative doesn’t necessarily have to be all about your output, the physical things you make or create, but it also the way you choose to live and think - to do things differently, to create magic in your daily life and to live in pursuit of the things that bring you joy and peace.

Ultimately our creativity is an expression of who we are, which is something worth holding onto above all else…

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Well, that was a long one - thank you for sticking with it to the end. Although it was hard to relive that terrible time, it feels good to share the story; it’s something I’ve carried inside for a long time. Writing here about our slow adventures and encounters with Nature has been hugely beneficial and we get a lot of joy out of sharing what we do - we hope you get something out of it too and we’re super grateful for all the interactions and support over the last 100 issues that have helped us to keep going. Thank you.

With warmest wishes until next time, which we hope will feature tales (and some photos) of camping in the mountains…

Andrew, Emma and Benji

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