17/10/2026
Sometimes I Am the Person I Am Trying to Reach.
Earlier today I caught a Facebook post from somebody asking for help. Their anxiety had reached a point where they didn't know what to do.
I started writing a reply and then Facebook refreshed and the post disappeared. I hope they found what they needed. I could see that people had already responded with kindness, sharing counsellors, organisations, therapists, booking links and places to find support, and those things can absolutely have an important place.
But I wanted to say something else, because I recognised something of myself in that person.
I experience anxiety and overwhelm too. I sometimes struggle with things that other people seem to navigate easily. I can find digital information overwhelming. There are days when I want to withdraw, stay in my house and cancel things. Sometimes I don't want to go to my regular Qigong class, even though I know how I usually feel afterwards.
Increasingly, I realise that I am not standing outside the people I am trying to reach through Arts for Health & Wellbeing CIC. I am one of them.
And perhaps that is partly why I do what I do.
When anxiety is strong, I have learnt that I need to start with what is happening in my body, rather than trying to reason my way out of everything going around in my head. I breathe gently and deliberately; into the nose, out through the mouth. I put the phone down. I go outside. I walk or move my body. I hum. I make something. I speak to somebody I trust. I eat. None of these things is a magic cure, but they state change; and they are things we can do to help ourselves in the very moment of overwhelm. And they work. in the very moment of overwhelm this is how to get back to regulation in the mind and body.
Then comes the harder part for me: participation.
Sometimes every part of me wants to withdraw. Staying home feels easier. Cancelling feels easier. Avoiding the thing that frightens me feels easier. But I have learnt something about myself. When I can, I need to keep making small movements towards life and towards other people.
Not enormous brave ones. Sometimes just getting dressed and going to Qigong. Going for a walk. Making something. Phoning somebody. Walking into the room. Sitting at the table. Saying hello.
This week I found myself thinking about this particularly deeply after meeting Lisa Dunnington from the People's Health Alliance and talking about community and her Connect the Dots project. That conversation prompted me to go home and knock on twelve doors in the cul de sac where I have lived for twenty years. I met neighbours I had never properly met. I exchanged numbers with a family who told me they had wanted to introduce themselves too but hadn't quite found the courage. Other neighbours started asking after one another.
I realised again that community doesn't magically exist because we live beside one another.
We have to participate in it.
But participation isn't always easy, and I know that because sometimes I am the person behind the door who doesn't want to come out.
That is why I believe so strongly in creativity as a way in.
You don't have to arrive at an art session saying, “I'm anxious”, “I'm lonely” or “I need help”. You can just come and paint. Make a mark. Have a cup of tea. Sit beside somebody. Concentrate on something with your hands for a while. Conversation may happen or it may not. But you have participated.
And sometimes participation needs to work the other way around. Recently a person couldn't manage to come to one of my art sessions, so I took two canvases and the theme of the session to her so that she and her teenage son could make something at home. Community shouldn't only belong to the people who find it easy to get through the door.
This is becoming increasingly central to why I created Arts for Health & Wellbeing.
I am not trying to fix people. I don't have all the answers. I am trying to create opportunities for us to make small movements towards creativity, expression, nature, movement and one another.
Because I know what the other direction feels like too.
I know the pull towards the house, the phone, the cancelled plan and the smaller world.
And I know that sometimes, when I can manage it, doing the thing I am frightened of is exactly what opens my world again.
Perhaps community is partly this: sometimes I reach for you, sometimes you reach for me, and between us we make it a little easier to take part.
