Article: Without Adversity, Would We Always Have Art?

In 2018 I wrote a play about loneliness. Loneliness was something that had plagued me for a couple of years, making me anxious, full of self-loathing, and deeply fearful of the future. I was in my second year of university and, at the start of that year, I had told myself I would not write a play to take to the Edinburgh Festival fringe because I didn’t have any ideas. I have plenty of time, I told myself, I’ll just put it off until another year. Then, late into the second term, I got rejected by yet another man from a relationship I thought was about to bloom. I was coming off Citalopram, I was extremely stressed from a million and one things going on, and then I was heart-broken; that deep-seated fear of loneliness was creeping back in. It was at this point that I made the decision to write a play about this fear. I was going to write, direct and perform it directly out of my own experiences. I told myself that by the time I had performed the play at the Edinburgh fringe I would be feeling mentally healthy again. I signed myself up for some university counselling sessions, put myself back on a course of anti-depressants, and threw myself into university work, writing and creating this play. I was not going to dwell on this person and get nothing out of it; I was going to direct my sadness and my fear into creative expression. Read the rest of the article here: https://www.mxogyny.com/arts-media/without-adversity-would-we-always-have-art-the-importance-of-mental-health-to-creativity