The Avoidance Of Butterflies: Living every day with anxiety
A friend just messaged these past days asking how I was. “Tired” was my brief but honest response. I followed up later by asking them the same question. “How are you?” Their response was one I hear way, way too often:
“Yeah I’ve got anxiety most days so I’m not so good”
Anxiety. Aren’t you bored of hearing or seeing this word in our everyday discourse? I’m bored of living with the condition. I’m deeply, deeply bored of these feelings of…panic, pain and fear. It’s normal now. A day seldom passes without me experiencing a hyperventilating urge to get out of a room/situation/conversation as quickly as possible, with absolutely no thought given of the cost to friendship, family, or fraternity. Or that general desire just to sit with my head in my hands and wait for the latest crisis to pass. Even when I know there isn’t a crisis. Even when I know that my body is just flooding me with cortisole because one of my internal hormone taps is bust and there is actually nothing whatsoever to be ‘fearful’ of.
I’m bored of it. I suspect that you are bored of reading about it?
But as is often my way, finding myself broken in an emotional black spot, is what leads me to create a new body of work. I respond to my own emotional experiences by trying to communicate the…absurdity or futility, of allowing emotional upset or imbalance to…govern how I live. Building a lifestyle ruled by my own unhelpful disproportionate emotional reactions to every day events, is a pathway to a life less full. By hiding from something bad that might happen, I am also removing myself from the playful, hilarious, weird and fulfilling things that can also happen in the every day.
I've realised that trying to avoid situations that may trigger a mini meltdown has led me to, well, avoiding any situations. ANY situations! I mean, why would I go socialise or visit a show or speak to someone when hell, I might freak out and succumb to that sudden urge to get out of the room? Trying to avoid uncomfortable situations is leading me to avoid living, and that really is moving towards not living at all! And I wonder how many of you feel the same. Or can see yourself following me down that same path?
From that place has come my new collection: The Avoidance Of Butterflies I’ve tried to conceptually illustrate this ‘hiding away’ from life by placing beauty in the midst of a barren landscape. The vulnerability of nudity, hiding behind a thin veil of concealment. Hiding for what? To escape nature’s most beautiful creatures? :) Why do we try to shut ourselves away from the beauty, the absurdity, the hilarity of the world? Because we might freak out? I mean, speaking personally, even when I do freak out, I really only go stand outside for a while. Our fear of what might happen is preventing us from just being. Preventing us from seeing and smelling and touching the world. We know it isn't as bad as our panic attack monster wants us to think it is.
Why “Butterflies”? Well the phrase “Having butterflies” is a very innocent way of describing the experience of nervous, excited anticipation. It’s a phrase I grew up with. I think that feeling of ‘butterflies’ is the infant child of the monster that is anxiety :)
But how do we even begin to cognitively deal with the debilitating dread that anxiety and panic attacks can become. What does it matter that I’ve made a pretty picture based on a wordplay? Well it doesn’t really matter outside of the fact that pictures are the most eloquent way I can find to communicate what I feel :) I want these images to serve my collectors. To help the you perhaps reflect on your experiences and how you cope with anxiety, panic, fear or any other emotional response that is actually harmful to how we live our lives.
For me, I’m going start thinking of my own ‘anxiety’ episodes as my subconscious sending me little…postcards from the past, little reminders that once upon a time, a thing happened and it didn’t go very well for me and that the situation I now find myself in (something really crazy dangerous like waking up in the morning) might lead to another non beneficial experience. And I’m going to sit with that, look at the postcard, read the ‘post it’ memo and remind myself that whatever that past experience was…I really kinda survived it ok. My ‘be scared’ fawcet is bust and while I need to be reminded not to walk across a freeway, it’s probably ok to get out of bed and take a shower.
I've decided to treat these "butterflies", the racing heartbeat, the tight chest, the urge to flee – as my body’s response to a memory. A memory triggered by something that’s happening now but that is not the memory :) If you identify with these experiences then can’t we agree that our anxiety is simply our body's natural response to an echo from our past, something that challenged us or had a non-beneficial outcome. But something that is gone.
Rather than trying to avoid a situation that is no longer here, perhaps we could learn to look away from these ‘emotional postcards’ and recognise the actual world that surrounds us now, and consider just how far we’ve travelled to get here.
We could choose to recognise Anxiety, or Panic Attacks, as a physical reaction to being reminded of something that in actual fact, we overcame. Something we escaped and moved on from. Something that time helped us to heal from. Easy to say? Tough to do? Yep. But heh what is our alternative??? :)
The Avoidance of Butterflies will be on general release on the 1st October 2025 in a very small print run and will only be available for two weeks. Subscribers to my site will have seven day pre order access from Monday 25th September.