health – Nastasya Parker

Staying Creative

This Week’s Bit of String: An accident-prone day

You know those days when everything goes wrong? Last Sunday, I had a few chores left on my weekend list. I needed to change the sheets, but inadvertently laundered a tissue with the bed linens. It avenged its fate by leaving sticky fragments all over everything.

I stepped outside to put some recycling in the bin, an opportunity also to chat with our neighbour in the adjoining half of the duplex. This brought up a fencing dispute which is provoking grief and peevishness on both sides.

While we attempted to reach a compromise in the sunshine, I saw my cat speed round the house and dart in the open back door with a pigeon in his mouth. I spent the next 20 minutes waiting for him to finish tearing into it behind the couch, and at least as much time after that shifting the furniture, picking up pieces, hoovering feathers, cleaning the carpet, and wiping bloodstains off the lamp cable.

In the afternoon, I needed to clean the fridge. I dropped an egg, it slipped underneath the appliance, I had to empty the fridge completely and move it and clean behind it. When wiping the worktops in preparation for hoovering, I tipped a bit of water on my laptop, which has thankfully survived unscathed.

With half my chores taking up more time and aggravation than planned, I reached the evening exhausted (but with a clean house!) and thought, am I actually going to write today? I barely felt human, let alone like a writer.

The Great Humaniser

Maybe I was a walking disaster because, after a week of flu, I was still battling extra fatigue and some headaches. My husband was now in the throes of the virus so the house was generally miserable, had been for a little while, and wouldn’t be imminently abating.

*Thank goodness it’s been sunny and springy or I’d have been seriously depressed.*

When I’m sick, or drained after being sick, I refer to myself as “running a reduced service.” I still have to do laundry and basic cleaning and cook and if not get groceries myself, arrange for them. Have to help my family in whatever way possible, and must get back to school to do my job as hastily as I can. The result is I’m doing nothing but work and chores; no extra exercise or writing sessions. No social gatherings or outings for entertainment, or long hikes. It’s a drag and can continue for weeks because a reduced service is still fairly demanding and I’m rarely getting a decent night’s sleep.

I don’t know if it’s the best physical remedy, but the best emotional one might be to write anyway. That’s what I did Sunday. I bashed out 500 more words of a character sketch, prepping a new novel. I went from feeling I was barely surviving, to remembering I am capable of adding beauty and empathy to the world through what I create.

Any creative endeavour brings out our humanity and even transcends it.

Why We Write

The past couple weeks reminded me why we write (or make music, or create art). Even while I was sick, if I could get a few minutes of fresh air, and perk myself up listening to quality tunes, I could then engage in some writerly activity most days. That creative feeling fought off some of the glumness.

Here are ways creativity elevates us:

Wearing pyjamas for the 4th day running doesn’t mean we can’t write a piquant description of the flowers sprouting outside or the cat’s sleeping position. Tip: Take 5 or 10 minutes, scribble about what you see. Write your favourite line from those scribbles on a post-it or take a picture on your phone as a reminder of your formidable talent.

The more we practise bits of writing, the more we notice without trying. When an articulate description comes to mind, we feel observant; we feel less like we’re missing out on life. Even if that’s a clever phrase about how cough syrup tastes, or the pound of a headache.

We can still be part of a community. Being on Twitter isn’t always a positive experience these days, but I was running the profile for the Women Writers Network while I was poorly. My Tweet about a recent visit to Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, an independent bookshop in Bath, received over 350 likes, and dozens of responses with other writerly/ literary types adding their indie bookseller recommendations. It turned into a real bright spot. If you’re low on energy, taking a few minutes to encourage and lift up others on social media can boost our mood.

When we’re forced to take a break, it knocks our confidence. I found that, though I’d kept some semblance of writing in my life, I still felt disheartened about picking up bigger projects again. On Saturday while I was feeling a bit better, I sat in the sunny dining room and did a watercolour based on a favourite place, where I’m setting my next novel. I’m not an artist and don’t have much experience with watercolour, but I made myself complete it. This took less mental energy than writing, but plenty of courage. And I don’t hate how it turned out. It reminded me it’s ok to bash out writing too. We just have to go for it.

Do you use creativity as an antidote when things go wrong? What are your tips for maintaining a creative state of mind when low on strength?

Feed and Flow

This Week’s Bit of String: Starving feet and empty legs

When they were little, my kiddo would sometimes pause their playing and say, “I’ve got my starving foot on!”

I assumed this was Bear’s way of telling me they were hungry right down to their toes, similarly to how my aunt described adolescents as “reaching the empty leg stage.” So I’d scramble to provide a snack.

Years later, I found out Bear was actually telling me their foot had fallen asleep. That pins and needles sensation in their extremities felt similar to the queasy emptiness of hunger in the belly, I suppose.

*Then there’s this little guy, who slept 8 hours straight one day last week after bringing a live bird inside, chasing it around, and then eating most of it.*

“Yeah,” mused Bear, “I always wondered why you gave me food every time my foot went dead.”

It’s an interesting feeling, hunger. Sometimes weirdly similar to feeling overfull, the ache and stretch of a stomach panicking, desperate to adapt its shape to the circumstances. While our minds seek refuge from pain, they are to an extent sharpened by hunger, since surplus can dull us.

Coming Clean

Over the half-term week off I began a change, cutting down my food intake and waiting 18 hours between one day’s evening meal and the next day’s late lunch. It’s a decision based partly on aesthetics, as I would catch sight of myself looking puddly, a bit of a soft mound. I’m proud of being a busy and vibrant person, and although the tiredness of life has accumulated somewhat, I still sort of picture myself as that trim mum chasing a little kid around.

When Eve goes through her first pregnancy in my novel–the first ever human pregnancy, according to the Creation myth–she describes how “hunger and revulsion vied in my belly.” When our appetites have such complex manifestations, it’s easy to convince ourselves that our bodies and minds want things they don’t actually need.

*Saving myself the time it takes to bake goodies like this lemon meringue cake, and saving myself money on peanut butter.*

Over the last decade, I got in the habit of having “a little something,” a la Winnie the Pooh, to get me through whenever I had to do something hard. The problem, as you may swiftly detect, is that there are a lot of things we have to do that we don’t want to. Some days are an absolute litany of them! And my definition of a difficult task broadened to pretty much any job I wasn’t keen on. Even parts of the writing process fall into that category.

That’s why during half-term, when I had some time to do things I wanted to do, I stopped indulging in that way. Weirdly, it hasn’t been super difficult, even this week back at school. I feel a lot calmer not relying on sugar to get by, and probably in no small part because I stopped telling myself I deserved a “treat” at the slightest jostle to my plans.

Treating Myself

I’m still not getting a lot of sleep, but I’m finally accepting that sweets (and peanut butter by the spoonful) don’t cure tiredness. If they did, I wouldn’t have to keep dosing up on them.

It’s a conundrum in busy, tiring lives, keeping ourselves going in the short-term without sacrificing the long-term. I am not angry at myself for waiting this long to return to better habits. I don’t judge anyone else for doing the same, so why be nasty to myself? There are periods in our lives when it’s just not within our strength to make the best long-term decisions.

Instead, we treat ourselves to little immediacies, a pleasant taste on the tongue, a gravity to our middle while everything rushes around us. Now, I think I’m ready to go beyond “treating myself.” I’m going to treat myself… as the person I want to be.

Treating myself to a few extra minutes of sunshine taking the long way home on a nice day, instead of rushing over shortcuts to get chores done after work. Treating my stomach to a long rest. Treating my brain to concentrated periods of writing work instead of little bits here and there.

When thinking through this issue, I looked up the etymology of related terms. Words like food and hunger are so tied to basic physical needs, their roots have no surprises. The etymology of nourishment, though, reminded me of its Latin ties to nursing, as in feeding a baby, and before that, it shared the prefix nau: to swim, to flow. I do feel as if I’m getting into a more natural flow.

When my kiddo was a baby and I nursed them, they caught on quickly to the fact that milk hormones put them to sleep. Bear never wanted to sleep, even as a newborn. So they’d hum, kick, even bite to keep themselves awake while eating. It was not a tranquil experience. But it’s interesting, that link appearing again between a sated appetite and sleepiness, between hunger and staying awake. Exercising discipline physically, I feel, helps my discipline mentally.

How do hunger and satisfaction affect your mental and creative states?

Fever

This Week’s Bit of String: Overheated eyeballs

I have this bad habit of getting coughs. These aren’t misguidedly romantic chest coughs that might have made it into an epic nineteenth century novel or opera, just ugly, scraping hacks. My throat spasms into wretched fits. It carries on for weeks, my ribs get bruised, it’s exhausting.

Often, I’ll briefly get a high temperature with it. The kind of fever that crawls up behind your eyeballs and tenderises your skull. It’s not great for productivity, but does inspire vivid descriptions, if I do say so myself.

It may be a sign that I’ve been doing too much. I feel I should be able to Do All The Things. After all, I eat plenty of fruits and veggies, and get up early for exercise and fresh air. However, I seem to get sick when I’ve been completing a big writing project while also, as always, working full-time and taking care of my family. It’s as if that extra creative endeavour pushes me over the edge.

*Hiking during our camping weekend–totally worth it.*

At the moment, I’ve just missed a couple days of work for flu-like symptoms, probably a back-to-school virus, so now I’m trying my best to be quiet and not start coughing. This followed a weekend camping trip to the Peaks and copious reading about story structure, plus overtime planning resources for small group interventions at work, doing critiques for other writers, trying to finish a short story and while I haven’t quite begun the next rewrite of my novel, I’m thinking REALLY hard about it, ok?

Health Warning

Can writing affect our health? Is it one thing too much? I definitely am less grouchy when I’ve been able to write, preferably in a quiet setting, unlikely though that last bit is. I think it helps my mental health—but maybe it’s just that I place high standards on myself and I feel better for Getting Things Done, whatever the things may be.

Writing is a passion—and the root of that word is bound up with suffering. It is ‘that which must be endured.’ Hard, necessary work. It is absolutely fun and exciting, too! But it takes a lot of effort and relentless, toiling THOUGHT to make it good. So yes, it probably does impact our health.

I always felt guilty missing work if I picked up a bug while traveling, or if I’d run myself down finishing a novel. Was it wrong of me to let my personal interests impede my contracted employment? I worried I was behaving as selfishly as I perceived people who always called in sick on Mondays because they were still hungover. I’m still not convinced I’m being completely fair to co-workers or to my family in how I expend my energies.

But there are other fevers that make our brains itch. Characters that pummel our skulls from within and ideas that sputter up from deep inside us. We’ve got to write.

Incandescence

Sometimes, I do great work when I’m sick. I wrote a play during an extended bout of flu. It was about a team monitoring a whole city’s worth of subconsciouses, spying on people’s dreams to solve crimes.

*I call this one: Still life of a working writer mid-term*

Weird, I know. But kinda cool? Anyway, it did get through a competition and we performed it. Someday I might develop it further than a single act, and make a series of it or something.

In the same way that extreme weather or stress sears certain things into our memories and forms indelible creative impressions, health events can crystallise ideas.

From the tuberculosis that ravaged the Bronte family to Stephen King’s childhood ear infections which he writes about in his memoir On Writing, it does seem as if cycles of illness and health sharpen our imaginations. Have you ever found this?

While I was sick this week, my brain came to a screeching halt over work things like differentiating Science vocabulary on independent or dependent variables. But it did present me with a striking novel-related sequence, like a dream Eve or Cain might have. It unfolded before me as I trudged to work (and didn’t stay long). My elevated temperature practically distilled my story’s essence better than my healthy brain could.

What links do you see between your health and your creativity?