How Calligraphy Helps Me Cope With Anxiety
Writing stress reduction, meditation, and self-care into my mental health regimen
This past week has been rough for my mental health. With the current state of the pandemic in the U.S., my own career uncertainties, and all my unresolved feelings of inadequacy, I’ve increasingly felt like my chest was caving in along with the rest of my life.
In April I was furloughed from a part-time job I didn’t even really like. It pushed me to start freelancing, a goal I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while. I just didn’t expect to be thrown into it like this.
I’m a new freelancer, and even newer to Medium (shoutout to my fellow newbies who also have no idea what they’re doing!). As a result, I’ve been reading self-help ebooks, signing up for copywriting newsletters, attending Upwork webinars, and doing my fair share of soul-searching.
Compounded with my own personal habit of constantly comparing myself to others, these past few months have made me very anxious indeed. Am I cut out for this lifestyle? How do these professionals make it sound so easy? Why am I not getting the same results that they are? How do I make all these connections people keep talking about if we’re all stuck at home?
In the past three months, I’ve taken up a new hobby that has helped me quiet these voices: calligraphy. There’s something in the way the letters form, one after another with every swipe of the pen, that makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.
I’m not trained. In fact, until a friend told me that modern western calligraphy is basically bold downstrokes and light upstrokes, I never even knew how it was made. But now this knowledge has inadvertently created an outlet for my anxiety and frustration.
Celebrating Beauty
In poetry, every word matters. Such is the case with calligraphy, too.
In the beginning, I just copied out love poetry — the over-the-top language seemed like a great fit for the extravagant craft of calligraphy. Soon I branched out to other poetry that I loved, imbuing each word with the same focused emotion that the words filled me with whenever I read them.
Good lettering comes, in large part, from the proper balance of quick strokes and long, slow strokes. Finding these rhythms in calligraphy, as well as the rhythms in the poems themselves, puts my mind in a meditative zone. I’m fully present, my entire focus on the exact angles of my script. The world falls away, and I’m completely immersed in the beauty of it all.
Calming Perfectionist Impulses
I’ve found that the quality of calligraphy I produce is directly related to how I’m feeling. On days that I’m tired and my focus is scattered, it shows in the lettering.
For instance, compare this to the above:
As someone who struggles with indecision, I found a way to recognize my mistakes as proof of action rather than acts of failure.
I found that I enjoy the process of clearing my mind and seeing the physical manifestation of that process in the form of ink on paper. As in meditation, the mind wanders. That’s just what it does. What’s important is that we notice it and gently bring ourselves back to focus.
Thus, I’ve learned not to get stressed when my strokes aren’t perfect — the imperfection itself is a snapshot, the story of my life at a given moment in time. As someone who struggles with indecision, I found a way to recognize my mistakes as proof of action rather than acts of failure.
Escapism
When the pressures of real life — and the pressures I place on myself on a daily basis — get to be too much, I turn to escapism. In addition to reading, calligraphy is my favorite way to get away: I’m sucked into the swish and smell of ink on paper, a mild scent that comforts me instantly.
In fact, it gets even more immersive when I practice calligraphy in a different language. For example, I’ve copied out favorites from a thin volume of French love poetry. Memories of how and where I got the book — at the iconic Shakespeare & Company in Paris, while on a weekend excursion from studying abroad — come flooding back, reminding me of a simpler, happier time in my life.
Not knowing exactly what the words say is part of the fun. Aside from a few cognates that jump out at me every now and then, the poetry remains a mystery. But it draws me in nevertheless. As if telling me to be at peace with the knowledge that there’s much I’ll never know. But as long as I approach the world with an open mind and heart, I’ll be okay.
As a writer, I once believed that the most magical thing about writing was stringing words in the right order to elicit an emotional or intellectual response. Through calligraphy, I fell in love with the very act of writing, the very act of putting a pen to paper. In the process, I let the pen-strokes patch me up, one self-loving letter at a time.
If you’re anything like me, you know that it’s so easy to fall into a downward spiral of self-loathing. Oftentimes, it’s easier than looking on the bright side. So self-love is a choice we have to consciously make, everyday.
If you’re still reading this, my hope is that you, too, find something — be it calligraphy or not — that brings you solace, and that you turn to it in times of need.
