Navigating Sociopolitical Stress: What We Can Learn from Art Making
Go online for a few minutes, and you will be inundated with catastrophes. The world feels really hard right now, and it can feel nearly impossible to escape the fear and tragedy. Maybe you don’t want to escape - you want to keep up, because it all feels both important and urgent. Maybe you can’t escape - because it directly impacts you and/or those you love.
But then, you are met with hopelessness. A deep pit of despair.
How did we get here? What can I (read: insignificant, powerless, small, me) even do about this? I can’t even keep up. Another thing? Is this the same shit as yesterday, or a new one? Did they really say that? Wait, is it still January? It’s March. It’s not even been two months? What will happen in four years? Am I doing this right? I need to leave. I need to stay. Are we going to be okay? Hey, are you okay? Okay, I’ll go to that protest. Wait, I can’t take off from work. I have to work through this shit? Wait, do I have a job? I forgot breakfast. Can I get groceries this week? Maybe I’ll forgo eggs. Pink suits? Really? I’m so tired. I can’t stop. I need less screen time. I need to know what’s happening. What can we do? Is this ever going to get better? I’m so tired…
I hear you. Truly.
Often, we can feel like our only option to escape hopelessness is dissociation. That checking out from the suffering of the world, and how it impacts us and our loved ones, is our only ticket to experiencing some levity. But that feels bad too because it goes against our values of staying tuned in, caring, fighting. So now the options we see on the table are hopelessness, despair, and shame.
But it does not necessarily have to be this way.
Something I love deeply about art making (and the creative process overall) is how much it can teach us, in parallel, ways to navigate everyday life. Even if you are not an artist, or don’t see yourself as creative (hint: you probably are in some way), I want to share six lessons I’ve learned from art about navigating the sociopolitical dumpster fire:
1. Art, like our internal experience, is non-linear.
One of the most powerful components of art making is that it is not limited by time or space. It is not linear, like traditional spoken language or writing. Things do not have to have an order, do not have to follow a logical pattern, do not have to have a chronology. Elements can coexist, interact, and take up space together on the same canvas without needing to necessarily outcompete each others’ validity or gravity.
When we look at “hope”, we often see it as a spectrum - from hopeful to hopeless, on which you can only find yourself on one point of that spectrum at any moment in time. But if we look at our experience more like a piece of paper or a canvas, or even a song, or a dance, it can offer us a space where hopefulness and hopelessness are not mutually exclusive. Where both can exist at the same time without invalidating the other. Sharp, harsh crooked lines on the same page as a soft wash of color. A loud, deep drum in the same song as an inspiring melody. Alternating tightening and squeezing your left hand and releasing and stretching your right.
Grief and optimism, creation and loss. You are beautifully complex, and do not have to sacrifice one for the other. In fact, their coexistence is often much more powerful than either alone.
2. Reflective distance
“Reflective distance” is a powerful element of artmaking, and one of the reasons art therapy can be so special. It is the perspective offered by externalizing something, stepping back from it, taking it in, and being curious about it. Creating a drawing, hanging it up, and stepping back. Maybe you turn it a few times to look at it from different angles or orientations. Putting it away for a week, coming back, looking at it again. Does it look any different? If you’re sharing it with others, what do they see that you didn’t notice? (This can be similar in music, dance, poetry, or any creative process.)
Rather than disconnecting or dissociating, it could be helpful to offer yourself some reflective distance from what is happening around you. The goal is not to suppress how you feel or have a false sense of peace about sociopolitical events that are impacting you - but to instead be intentional, curious, and interact with information with care. Allow others to “view” the situation with you so you are not alone. Be mindful of sensationalism or covert intentions to overwhelm your system. Put it away when you need to, knowing that it is available for you to return to when you are ready.
3. Destruction often happens swiftly and all-at-once, and creation often is slow, intentional, and over time.
Spilling coffee on your watercolor, your computer crashing while saving a music file, your dog chewing up your journal, washing the scarf you just knitted and it turning into a coaster - things can be “ruined” in an instant, completely disregarding the emotional and creative labor you put into making something. It can be absolutely devastating to have something you were so invested in and cared so much about be damaged or destroyed.
In parallel, the destruction and damage going on around us in our world, our climate, and our communities often feels intense, quick, and devastating. Things that we, and those long before us, worked hard to build and fight for.
I think there is a similar path available for both. First, grieve. Let yourself feel upset, angry, frustrated, or sad. Maybe even actively mourn with rituals. Next, know that our creation and building isn’t a zero-sum game. Just because something was damaged or destroyed, doesn’t mean it was worthless, that it cannot be rebuilt or reworked, or that it is not worth pursuing again. And when you’re ready, get back to creating. Even if the “product” is gone or different than before, the process is still alive. Creation has no end. (Bonus: you don’t have to do any of these steps alone. All of this can be a cooperative, collective effort - even with art.)
4. How we create is different. That is not only okay, it is valuable.
In all creative modalities, there is a massive range of focuses, skills, mediums and ways to create. And even more amazing, there are new ones being created all the time, hand and hand with ancestral and ancient methods traveling through the millennia.
The materials, mediums, sounds, words, textures, scents; how we hold our pencil; how much “tin” is in the percussion. All of these things make us unique and also allow us to offer a special gift to the collective. I literally cannot imagine art without variety, and similarly, I don’t think our way through the stresses of the world will be effective if we’re all moving through it the same way. Finding alignment with our skills, passions, and the energy we have to give allows us to create harmony. Like in a chorus - if we are all singing the same part the entire time, it is not going to have the same richness and depth.
How you engage in activism, community efforts, self-care, and learning is allowed to be what works for you. This will allow you to navigate these times sustainably and holistically, and will allow you to contribute to collective efforts in an effective and authentic way.
5. Art never has to be “done.”
One of the coolest things about art is that you can work on it forever. I really enjoy using a one canvas painting approach (sometimes called “el duende”) with clients in art therapy and for my own art practice. Layer after layer, watching something transform, not always knowing exactly where it’ll end up. You can also put away a journal, a song you’re writing, a drawing you’re working on, a dance you started choreographing, and come back to it even years later to pick it back up again. And something being “done” doesn’t have to be a permanent state - it can be a temporary decision. You always have the ability to go back and update, change, tweak, or even make it unrecognizable.
One challenging part of sociopolitical stress is that it is ongoing and uncertain. It is never “done.” It can wax and wane (though lately, it feels like it is just waxing!) but it is never fully over. I think that is one of the places where hopelessness can seep in. In tandem, our response to it also gets to be ongoing and build upon itself. We get to add layers and continue to work on things as our creativity, skill, understanding, and values grow and change. We can put it down for a moment and come back to it and it will be there for us. Maybe that also feels hard - that we’ll, in some form or another, be doing this forever (just like those before us). But maybe it also offers us the ability to let go of unhelpful perfectionism and urgency, and instead find peace in steady, cyclical resistance.
6. The power of radical imagination
I have been grateful to learn from ther many incredible voices sharing about the powerful practice of “radical imagination”. This term beautifully captures why artmaking can be so healing, powerful, and offer a viable pathway for hope during times of sociopolitical distress.
Everything man-made on this earth was first imagined. Think about that. Everything required imagination. Art, inventions, structures, healthcare procedures, how we measure time and space. Even the horrific things we see and experience - bias, oppression, marginalization, climate destruction/disregard, genocide, power systems. Someone(s) imagined those.
We all have the power to imagine: a better, equitable, more compassionate world; ways to care for each other and ourselves; ways to repair and relate to our land; ways to connect with each other; and so, so much more. We have the power to take our imagination and externalize it into creativity - art, music, writing, dance - and also into action. Beginning in our little corners of the world, we can imagine and create ecosystems of care, kindness, respect, mutual belonging, and love.
Being a human in the world right now is a tall order. It makes sense if you are scared, sad, or mad - and you do not need to shove that down or disregard it in order to get through this, or even to have hope. We have art and creativity as an avenue to guide us, and most importantly, we have each other.
