How my battle with anxiety is helping me paint — and vice versa

How much of this story do I tell?

Let’s start with 2007. Without my knowledge or permission, something happened that year. I went from not thinking twice about boarding a plane to developing a severe fear of flying.

For the next 10 years, I’ve wrestled with my mind (and pride) each time a vacation or work trip has been scheduled. Struggling silently hoping excitement beats fear in the battle inside my head.

In the best of times, I board, fly, land, everything is fine. Most of the time though, I survive the anxiety by having a few drinks, making awkward conversation with strangers next to me, flirting with airline staff or taking medication to calm and trick my mind into relaxing.

The past six months have been exceptionally difficult: I chickened out of a work trip overseas to visit our troops (while I was packing), I cancelled a vacation to L.A. (by blaming it on costs), and I let my team down by ditching them at a soccer tournament in Vegas (crying as in adult in the middle of Miami isn’t hot). The Miami incident was particularly significant. I knew I needed to take real action.

So, I got professional help — which involves reading and practicing mindfulness. According to my psychologist, I need to do a better job of being “present” and taking back control of my thoughts. Not the ones where I dwell on past mistakes. Not the ones where I let fear take over when thinking of things in the future.

The now. This moment. You know, the place most of us rarely visit because so many of us live life on autopilot (see what I did there?!).

It’s a process. And, just last week I got on a three-hour flight, and landed, without the influence of alcohol or medication.

Small steps. Small victories, I’m told.

I’ve also started painting again, which oddly, I’ve always found to be immensely therapeutic. When I came out to my parents and friends in 2006, it was art that helped me get through that uncomfortably painful time in my life. So much so that I ended up putting on my first art show, appropriately entitled “From Dark to Art.”

Back then, I felt like a fraud, putting paint to canvas as if I knew what I was doing. And then inviting a room full of people to look at it. What nonsense! In retrospect, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made — which brings me to the point of this writing: perspective.

Page 49 of my prescribed reading (James McCrae’s “Shit Your Ego Says”) goes something like this:

“When an artist looks at an empty canvas, she does not see the vibrant hues and bold brushstrokes of the finished painting. That would be too easy. What she sees is doubt and failure looking at her dead in the eye. Yet she continues. The war of creativity is not fought on canvas. The war is fought inside the artist’s mind. She can either allow uncertainly to defeat her, or she can overcome resistance and give birth to something new. This choice must be made again each day.”

Hmmm.

I can’t bring my canvas and paints onboard a plane, but I know a thing or two about doubt and failure. You do too.

Here’s my latest painting (38x60, acycril on canvas). I’m calling it Miami. It’s a disaster, and I kinda love it.

Stay tuned for art show details — I’m less of a fraud this time.

Head here to view more paintings from my 2017 collection.