April was a month of Rest 🦦🍃

Well hello there beautiful being! ✨

Welcome to this fresh newsletter! If you’re a new follower/reader, welcome. 💖🥰 I publish a newsletter once every month telling you a bit about things such as what I’m doing, how I’m feeling or what I’m struggling with. Giving you a peek behind my art and into my brain. 🧠💫

What I’ve Been Up To

The past month has been both amazing and overwhelming for me. I’ve been feeling incredibly motivated and inspired. Spring has brought a new fresh kind of energy, I loved seeing how the world got a little greener around here, how the birds came back and the little insects, the blossom on the trees, how everything came back to life. 🍃 And although there’s so much I’m grateful for and am enjoying. I also experienced some burn-out symptoms again, unfortunately. Like being overwhelmed by the smallest things, feeling annoyed, restless, and most of all: very tired.

I just had too many things going on at once, lots of what I love and like and things like therapy that required a lot of my energy and I didn’t take the rest I needed around all of this.

In the end though I noticed it. I didn’t push through when my body told me to stop. I took a full week off, unplanned, because I really needed it. That’s not an easy thing for me to do, because I often still feel guilty about resting.

The Magic of Rest ✨

Noticing when it’s time to stop is hard for me. I want to finish every task I start, I can be extremely persistent in what I do, it’s not done until it’s finished, really finished (whatever that means because when is something finished really? (see that’s were things go wrong🧐)). And I can’t rest until it’s finished. Even though I’ve become a lot less perfectionistic about things (phew), I still tend to overexert myself sometimes. Usually without even noticing. Besides that, I also have this kind of weird relationship with work and productivity; even when I need rest I still feel guilty about taking it. Which is silly because we need it. In fact, it might be the most productive thing we can give to ourselves.

I had to re-learn that resting is as productive as being actually productive (in a work kind of way). While we rest our body and brain get the chance to recharge, process everything we did, and most importantly, regain energy for the things we want to do. It creates new space for ideas to grow. You possibly also recognize that moment in the shower or when you’re on a walk or vacation and you get the best idea ever, and when you’re pushing for it at your desk you can’t seem to think of anything. That’s exactly why we need time off of everything at times.

But I guess taking time off is not as easy. At least I was not very easy for me, and I still struggle with it sometimes. My body was so used to stress that it craved it, it was an addiction, I had to be doing stuff. I had been in a survival state for so long that every time I got to a place of rest my body often thought (and sometimes still thinks): “But aren’t we supposed to be stressed??! We’re not safe like this now are we?”. And I have to keep on soothing it, saying: “We are safe, we can rest now, it’s okay.”

That definitely means going through some uncomfortable restless feelings, that means sitting outside staring at the clouds and feeling that clump in your chest that says you want to cry and scream because you’re so stressed(!!). It’s so important though to notice that, to sit with it, to think, this sucks, I hate it, and to just let it be exactly that. Have big cry maybe. Because after that you can start to actually enjoy the clouds, and mindlessly scrolling through your feed probably won’t feel as tempting anymore.

If I get to that place in my mind, I can take so much joy out of the simplest of things again, like the plants that grow outside, the way they unfold their leaves, they way they grow and blossom, the sun through the clouds hitting the leaves of the trees. Before I felt I always had to be somewhere else because I couldn’t enjoy anything around me. But throughout therapy and self-reflection I eventually realized it was my own mental state that was off. And the more comfortable I got with myself the more I started to enjoy everything that was already around me.

I also know that from that place I get to enjoy creating the most. I know that for some people art can actually be a way to deal with negative feelings, and at times it can be like that for me as well. I think that’s wonderful! But I also know that in general I create my most enjoyable and authentic work when I’m so close to myself that I can connect with the deepest part of me, and I can usually do that best when I’ve dealt with my stress and negativity beforehand because then I can sit still and listen to my inner world and see all the things it wants me to see. (Which is usually like a colorful magical explosion of all sorts of things.😂💖)

Future plans

So after taking some time off I started feeling so much better, and that I also gave me some time to think about what I want to focus on in the coming few weeks/months.

• Upgrading this Newletter

  I want to see what else I can add or do with this newsletter. Because I’ve mostly been sharing personal stories on here but I want to see if I can also include some more recommendations in future letters. Like my favorite books, artists, shows etc.⭐️ As well as adding some more visual content (I’m an artist after all right?!)

• Selling my Art!

  I’m gonna be working towards selling my art! I’ve been getting some questions here and there about if I will sell my art at some point. And the short answer is: Yes! I will. I do however want to think this through and make a solid website that will making purchasing work an enjoyable experience for the both of us. Besides selling originals I also want to do some research on selling some good quality prints, but I’ll have to look into that. 💖

   

Thank you so much for reading, and until the next one! 🍃

Lots of love,
Roos 💫