Today is Easter Sunday, and I’m sitting at dining table, laptop nestled among mountains of near-folded clothes, purple and white towels, and underwear. I’m also sneaking in some writing time before everyone wakes up and creates a house of chocolate-bunny-fueled loudness and grease-stained place settings.
And I can’t help but wonder about what today means in from the deepest of Christian mysteries: death and resurrection. And also what this season means in nature: life springing from underground1.
How these ideas relate to personal coping mechanisms, well, more below…
See, there have been a few times in my life I felt knocked to the ground so hard that I lost track of who I was. Felt literally dead, not able to tell which side of the life/death polarity I was experiencing. And my brain would spin out trying to make sense of a new and more mysterious world view. Fogginess ensued, as did grand mythic experiences of the mundane2.
This state could be called depression, or maybe mania, or maybe menopause, or maybe just losing a sense of “me” in relationship to the collective of “us.”
And who the f cares what I call it? A diagnosis is not the cure. Nor is a diagnosis the same as doing things daily to celebrate your existence.
Leaning into my personal coping mechanisms, making things here, exploring nature, taking adventures, and experiencing freeing states in new places, were what got me feeling better again. So, I’m sharing in case you ever need a formula that works.
Some blows below (feel free to ignore, my trials are pretty darn trivial compared to what folks in Gaza and Iran are going through right now):
- At 26, I needed to reinvent myself after a pinnacle moment in my art career and hard crash to realism. So I threw everything in the trash (literally, on State Street Brooklyn I left out several 4×6 foot canvasses for garbage pick up, and were grabbed up before the trash man came), then moved out of town.
- Another time, a bike accident fractured my skull, broke my wrist, and rendered me in back pain and depression with 60K in debt from medical care (I had no health insurance). I put professional-looking clothes on each day, wrote my debtors asking for forgiveness, called myself a money-making writer, and carried on.
- Another time, I worked myself into burnout while trying to become ‘indispensable’ for a company long after a typical contractor gig would complete, only to find myself ‘dispensed’ by people I trusted like friends. I coped by making art and committing to personal practice. This SymbolWork visual library grew to over 400 pieces, and this EMMpress became a way meet my monthly income and expression needs moving forward.
- There have been more. Many too embarrassing to write for self or others, so I won’t.
I share my process not because my life is such a lovely success in conventional terms, but because I always find a way back up again, no matter how buried I may have felt by life or people I’ve trusted.
Perhaps you’d benefit from discovering your own coping mechanisms, and as they say, lean into them?
I would suggest: if you know how to make things, try making things for you.
If you know how to strategize and plan, try strategizing and planning for you.
If you know how to cook, try cooking for you.
If you love to dance, be sure to dance some for you.
and so on.3
For me the key to coping was discovering what were those things I chose to do when I was a bored kid: then doing them. You know, pre-agenda, pre-work days. When life was something you didn’t ever worry about, you lived it.
Perhaps you occupied yourself with nature, art, music, being with friends? That’s what I did. Those times were an unfettered, deeply feeling, imaginative, and connected states of being. Raw, loving, adventurous and creative. Big highs, quiet boredoms, and some dark and dirty, crying-eyed lows too.
You know, being human.
Because I was blessed to be raised without screens at the fore, when I need to regroup, I return to being at nature and making things: seeing, feeling and appreciating light rays, breezes, winds, mists, and rain. I also travel to new spots and take in the human-made culture atop our beautiful planet.
Sometimes I feel taken up by stars and celestial anomalies, and sometimes I tempt lightning.
And because natural phenomena is at the ancestral core of all of our beginnings, perhaps you can regroup in this space too? Respectfully and with a ‘leave no trace’ kind of touch?
Nature will never do you wrong, except by bug bites, cold, wet, sunburn, or maybe sweating. And are those things even wrong? You can mitigate the effect of those minor inconveniences by inventions of modern society.
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on”
– Robert Frost
So to wrap this thing up on my own note not only Mr. Frost’s, here’s what I’ve come to know for sure: what you do, day to day, is a coping mechanism when life feels lost. And what you do day to day is also a celebration of life.
Without action perhaps you’d be an all day meditator, or maybe the motionless dead. If you’ve scrolled to this part of the page, I assure you, you are not.
If you are feeling down, you got this! If you are feeling springy and new, you’ve also got this! Coping brings hope to yourself and the others around you, so please keep going. 
With gratitude, Elizabeth
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT ;)
- If you are familiar with themes throughout this body of work, The Underground, Hades and Persephone are a deep thread. ↩︎
- Grand mythic experiences of the mundane, as an artist, I can chock up as a “win” ↩︎
- I love Kurt Vonnegut and this little writing device “and so on” is a direct lift from him. When I read Galapagos by Mr. Vonnegut, I gasped out a loud guffaw which surprised even me. “Thanks a lot big brain” I believe was the line in text. ↩︎