On Anxiety & “Do What You Love & You’ll Never Work A Day In Your Life.”
“Do now what nature demands of you. Get right to it if that’s in your power. Don’t look around to see if people will know about it. Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forwards and regard the outcome as a small thing.”
I love this quote from Marcus Aurelius. It’s the root of growth by focusing on the process and moving forward at the pace nature - and indeed life - demands, but also which you can meet. It’s especially relevant to the last year or so for me. If you have followed my work for a while now you may have noted things have been quieter in terms of making new photos, sharing them, and indeed across taking on much in the way of work. The reason for which is I’ve been stretched mentally for a long, long time, and I’ve been focused on doing what I can, when I can.
I was speaking to my girlfriend, Emma, just this morning about rest and truly making time to rest. When I say rest here I mean it in its fullest sense – no thoughts or worries about work, no rushing to be somewhere, just relaxing and unwinding. Restoring mind & body to a better place. During the conversation I realised I’ve had one week of full rest in the last decade or more, which was mid-December 2020, about 10 days into a near 4 week period of being signed off work due to stress and anxiety. I returned to work and left the job around the start of August last year. Rather than taking a period of rest for myself I dove headlong into photography and building up my business. Things went fairly well initially and I’d a lot of bookings coming into December & January. When restrictions hit and case numbers rose I lost most of that work and was wiped out financially for over 2 months. I wasn’t financially prepared for this, which was a great lesson in and of itself, and as a result the stress levels went through the roof. As things eased and life got around to some sort of ‘normal’ I was mentally drained, and failed to pull up into my business again. I stopped taking photographs. Every time I looked at the camera I thought; “fuck, I need to make money with this thing asap!”, and began to feel strong senses of imposter syndrome and of failure. I basically stopped doing something I love because I chose to try to make a living doing the thing I loved, stumbled, overthought it all, and avoided it. I lapsed back to an older behaviour which let anxious thoughts win out.
Since then I’ve been working away doing bar work part-time and slowly looking at and starting to take my next steps. Shooting the triathlon at the weekend was good fun and most importantly it sparked a little reminder for me of why I love the medium of photography. It reminded me of what I can do when I focus on the present moment and to go through the process of creating as ‘nature demands of’ me. I’ve a few other projects to see out the end of the year, and I’ll have calendars to come for 2023 as well (more on that very soon).
There’s a famous bon mot that asserts that to do something you love for a living will have you never feeling like you’ve worked a day in your life, and well, whoever wrote it obviously didn’t live life with often crippling levels of anxiety.
When you live with anxiety and are going through periods where it is a little uncontrolled in certain areas, every situation in that area ends up over-analysed – and not in any sort of productive or helpful manner. When anxiety levels peak at these times it’s ultimately (at least in my experience) a situation that ends up in classic avoidance due to overwhelm caused by irrational thoughts and a failure to process fact from fiction. For me, this has meant avoiding photography at times due to irrational thoughts and a heavy dose of imposter syndrome.
It is hard to live with anxiety. It’s a constant effort to see irrational thoughts and to let them float away, acknowledging them, but not being overcome by them. I’ve been doing so much better in most areas of my life, growing stronger mentally, and doing more and more outside of my comfort zone. Photography is one of a small number of remaining areas I think I need to push through the noise on. I have to be kind to myself in all of this. To acknowledge with fairness and kindness the talents I have. To accept a compliment when it’s given but to never seek it out, and to reaffirm to myself in my mind that I am skilled at certain things, and that I am hard working and capable of learning and doing well at anything I set my mind to. We all need to do this more for ourselves. To crush out the “can’t”, “should not” and “won’t”’s of the world from our brains when they seem all too overwhelming.
There’s an irony to writing this as the winter slowly approaches, but there are brighter days ahead. For me. For you. For all of us. We owe it to ourselves to push through, and to do as Marcus Aurelius wrote in the quote I shared at the start of this entry:
“Do now what nature demands of you. Get right to it if that’s in your power. Don’t look around to see if people will know about it. Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forwards and regard the outcome as a small thing.”
