According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, one of the key steps in maintaining positive mental health and well-being is developing coping skills. Many things can fall under coping methods, but the most important part is picking the one that makes you feel happy and safe and content. For me, art is my coping skill and one of my tools for centering myself and my thoughts. It is a way to take a pause from everything that is going on around me and enter a meditative state to bring a quiet and a calm when nothing else is helping me express how I feel. I turn to art to help explore what I am feeling without the added pressure of judging myself be that self-critical or at a technical level. Creating art is my safe space, and negativity is not allowed; I only allow thoughts that make me feel safe.

So, how does art help me as a coping mechanism? When I start drawing I enter a state of focus: the methodical and repetitive movement of repeating strokes keep my hands busy and a flow is formed which can be likened to meditation. My mind has the space to be quiet, which in turn allows me to tackle thoughts that would have otherwise caused me anxiety and despair because in this space I have full control.

A few years back, I left an abusive marriage, not completely unscathed though. The trauma still lasts, and specific occurrences will trigger panic attacks and seemingly minor things will make me anxiety-prone. During my marriage and immediately afterward, I was unable to express myself by writing or even by talking about why my relationship didn’t work. I would reach only one conclusion, “What’s the point of living—of being alive—if life is so lackluster and pointless?” And since I couldn’t formulate and express my thoughts by writing, the only way I was able to handle and quiet the hurricane of depressive thoughts was through art, be it drawing, painting, or paper folding; through any type of creating, I was able to suspend the onslaught of thoughts. I still felt dismal, but the act of exercising my thoughts and placing them into somewhat tangible forms gave a measured way for me to move forward and most importantly for healing to occur.

I believe it is easier to express using art because art has less concreteness than words do. They both capture emotions and feelings, but art has the ability to tackle a massive cloud of expression and build and refine upon those expressions. For example, I can make very angry and expressive marks using my paintbrush. I can fling paint at a canvas and have it splatter everywhere, or I can calmly draw lines in my sketchbook, carefully focusing on how straight they are— there is action in the expression, all that energy is focused out toward a physical output. It’s the synchrony of physical movement, the channeling of thoughts that leads to a physical manifestation that is called an art piece. I’m not denying the cathartic nature of writing, but when words fail at evoking and expressing the physical tangibility of anger or frustration or calm, art comes to the aid. I may write angrily, but an angry stroke will evoke and encompass that feeling even better.

By having a physical manifestation of the art piece that can hold my thoughts and emotions, I am able to put aside those feelings because they no longer exist only in my mind. They have a resting place that is outside and, thus, a closure. I found that as I drew more, I was able to find the vocabulary to express myself in words, which I took as a sign that healing was occurring. I recognized this pattern and used it to my advantage. When I became unable to write, I drew and vice-versa. The more I was able to create, the easier it became to tackle the trauma, to work through the triggers and to find my emotional center and stasis again.