I have a drawing habit. I’ve always doodled prolifically – on napkins, backs of envelopes, margins of agendas, reports, coffee lids, whatever. In discussions and meetings, whether in boardrooms or cafés, no one has ever objected. When the drawing stopped it was a shock. That was when I realised I was seriously ill.
I’ve gone through the scraps of paper I’ve kept over the years. I wanted to see if I could find enough to show you how my doodles changed either side of when I was the most ill and stopped entirely.
The things I doodle on a page are usually as baffling to me as they are to others. At one meeting I doodled a fat ring nosed bull sitting on an old fashioned chain pull toilet. It was only much later I recognised why. The meeting was full of bullshitters.
Doodling lets my subconscious talk to me. I get to see what it is saying because my monkey brain gets sidelined and shushed with the technicalities of working the pen. I can only guess at what some of them symbolise though. It’s a bit like trying to interpret dreams.
They were always a reflections of what was going on around me at the time of doodling, and the few I’ve kept were because I liked the ideas in them. I’ll likely turn some into woodcuts. But the doodles when I was ill were more about emotions than ideas and the drawing style was much more agitated and scratchy, scoring the pen into the paper.
My recovery is still on-going but looking back it is strange that my drawings are more frantic and illegible coming out of the illness than they were going in. Back when I was ill I didn’t care about not drawing or even about being alive or dead. Now from the viewpoint of recovery it is horrifying to me that I stopped drawing. I chose to make a living from drawing and drawing is my life.
So I suppose it might have saved that life. Because stopping drawing was such a clear signal, even if I wasn’t feeling it, that it got me to go and get help. What might have happened if I hadn’t had that signal?
