Elizabeth C. Haynes

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten to where I can hardly even skim the news. It seems like, over the last year especially, I’ve been walking this fine line of wanting to stay engaged with the world around me, but also wanting to protect myself from what I can only describe as widespread insanity.

I fantasize sometimes about moving out of the United States, because we seemingly are at the top of the insanity pile. We have ridiculousness here that nobody else has (rabid gun violence, a stupid healthcare system, poor safety nets, an unlivable minimum wage, no guaranteed parental leave, paltry PTO, etc.). Truly, I feel like I could make a long list.

But then I remember that not only are there worse places to live than here (the war-torn Middle East comes to mind), but there are “better” places to live that still have their own set of problems. Suffering is universal, really. Although we do make some interesting choices in this country that allow a lot of unnecessary hardships to impale a huge swath of the population. Our priorities are all messed up.

I have no idea what it will take for us to decide to do something different. We all talk about how only a few people are in power, and how a tiny fraction of humanity is making the terrible decisions for the rest of us. But we also forget how we, as a people, have allowed it. We have allowed it through our votes, through how we have continued to spend our money, through how we have approached the idea of community vs. the idea of the bootstraps individual.

We allow everything we see, and not enough of us want to do or be anything different.

I do think that the next 10-20 years are going to be a really interesting time to be alive. I have hope that we will make a major shift in the 2030s, because we seem on the precipice of a total collapse of what we think of as society and the world order. And also, our younger people have no hope of a livable future. Heck, I (Gen X) don’t even know if I can retire or if the planet will be on fire. Everything is completely unsustainable.

In the interim, I find that most of my life revolves around my little bubble. It’s myself and my husband and my cats, and the birds I feed outside, and my plants, and our little home we make together. It’s also my job, and my creative work, and the microcosm that is the town I currently live in. And when it’s not that, it’s often an escape to the past through classic movies or decades-old music.

I don’t like to run away from the now, as a practice, but lately the now really sucks. And maybe it’s ok if I tune out for a while, since I’m already doing my part to try to make the world better (shopping small businesses, spreading kindness, voting for change, recycling, reducing consumption). I don’t know. There are no answers at the moment, but it sure is hard to get up and move through this version of the world every day.

I’ve had an unusually rough week. Well, maybe not unusually. It’s been a rough almost 2 years with all of the personal challenges related to sick parents, moving multiple times, living in 3 states in a single year, etc. But I guess this week was one where everything was at the very front of my consciousness. I long ago reached the point of stuffing my feelings somewhere until they resurface as health issues or insomnia, but this week I sat and cried a lot. Although I also still had the health issues and insomnia.

Anyway.

Yesterday I was working on a painting tutorial (I do watercolor painting, for those who don’t know), because I’d decided rather recently to actually attempt video tutorials from start to finish. Normally I’d watch them from the sofa while lounging around, and then do my actual practice with book tutorials, but I felt like I was starting to stagnate.

The tutorial I attempted yesterday was a snowy forest, which I’d not tried before as I generally am terrible at trees and landscapes (even though I wish I wasn’t). But I’m motivated right now because I’d really like to paint my dad a snowy pine tree scene for Christmas. If he’s still here at Christmas anyway.

So I sat down at my painting table and worked my way through the tutorial, pausing the video many times so I could try to catch up. When I was done, I spent some time sitting in the quiet and feeling accomplished. And in that space, I noticed my energy had shifted. It was subtle, but there was a whisper of invigoration and positivity. And I also noticed that my aching elbow felt slightly better. Hmmm. These changes simply came from disappearing for 45 minutes into this made-up world of creativity, of blues and whites and trees and shadows and sky.

I know I am not doing enough of the important things that feed my spirit (painting, writing, tending to my plants, baking, reading). But I also have to cut myself some slack, because it’s really hard to do those things when you feel like you’re drowning all the time and that your physical energy was fully spent a year ago.

I’ve heard a number of spiritual teachers talk about how creativity is a huge part of the human experience. And I’ve heard others say that when you are not fully walking your path, or when you are fearful or full of negative emotions, that your physical health suffers.

I’ve found these sentiments to be true to an extent. And I also know that, when I really look over my life story, my daily choices and my runaway emotions do impact my health and energy levels. Stress is my very worst trigger for my health issues, and depression always impacts my ability to function and to sleep. Both of them impact how I choose to spend my time.

The emotional stuff transforms into the physical. Where else can it go?

I suppose the point of this post is two-fold:

1. I am trying to nurture the part of me that used to write almost every day, and not just for work. I want to find the creative part of myself that retreated into the shadows back around 2021, and transform that creative expression into a positive impact on my body and mind.
2. I am hoping to remind people of how much their emotions and their daily choices can impact their wellbeing. We should all be pursuing the parts of life that are important to us, and that allow us to be fully ourselves.

I guess that’s about it.

P.S. Here is a picture of the watercolor lesson I did last night.

My life has been swirling for 17 months.

My husband and I, to borrow a cliché, are like two ships passing in the night. Month after month he travels, then I travel, then he travels, then I travel. Until recently, that is, when my body started to give out and I had to transition to every-other-month trips, which really hurts my soul but I seemingly have no choice.

We’re not traveling for fun (what’s a vacation?), and not for work (although sometimes this happens too, and further complicates our schedules). But we’re traveling to see our sick parents. Our parents who got sick within 2-3 weeks of each other last spring. One diagnosis was pretty straightforward: cancer, stage 2; surgery, chemo, and radiation to follow. The other? Elusive. My dad’s sudden inability to walk, to talk, to use his hands, to eat, to see, to do anything…with no identifiable cause. No answers from literally the best doctors in the world (Mayo Clinic), and therefore no effective treatment…and we’re about out of options.

In those same 17 months, we have uprooted our lives twice. This was an attempt to problem-solve, where we abruptly left our home in Connecticut and plopped into a noisy, shoddy, miserable high rise in New Jersey that got us closer to an airport.

Then two months later, after being smoked out by neighbors multiple times a day/night and also suffering through 8-10 hours of building shaking from pile driving every single day, we uprooted again. Dart, thrown. Sort of. We just picked what was available, in a random town we’d never heard of, because there weren’t any other viable options at the time.

So here we are alone in New Jersey, missing our Connecticut life, cursing at the crappy weather (it’s windy here) and the noise (the trains blare their horns 24/7 as they pass by), and also bemoaning our “more accessible” airport (Newark) that has been failing and results in serious delays every single trip. And I’m feeling like…uggggggghhhhh.

What is this all for? Why is this happening and when will it stop?

Much to our dismay, the stage 2 cancer reappeared unexpectedly last month as an aggressive stage 4. The elusive diagnosis for my dad is still elusive, and none of the dozens of treatments they’ve tried have worked (“sorry, we still can’t find a cause”). I spend every day wondering if I’ll get to see him again, and I’m sure my husband has started wondering the same about his mom.

Anyway.

I don’t know what the point of this writing is except maybe to get it out of my energy field instead of continuing to spin internally and numb myself via screens. I mean, I’ll probably go do that in a few. But my soul is aching. And I can’t tell what, exactly, is causing the ache anymore. Maybe everything?

I sat with myself for a while last night to try to figure it out – partly because some rude humans were launching fireworks into the air until the wee hours, but partly because I’m just bone tired and I don’t know how to overcome it anymore. What is it?…I asked myself. Aside from the obvious, is there some other problem in my life?

The only thing I could come up with (so far) is that what I’m doing in my off hours isn’t serving me. Meaning the activities I’m choosing to do in an attempt to cope with the barrage of bad health news, the repetitive separations from my husband, and my utter dislike of our New Jersey location. The stuff like mindless scrolling and tv watching.

My off hours used to be spent strolling along the shore or under the trees, or taking a quick trip to the city to wander the streets, or working on my watercolor painting. I now just sit here and stare a lot. I don’t engage in anything meaningful because my life does not currently feel meaningful, and we’ve lost access to so many of the things that are important to my mental and spiritual health…trees, big city activities, shoreline, ospreys, eagles. We’ve even lost access to our favorite restaurants and have struggled to find places here that we like.

I feel like I’m burning the candle at both ends, so to speak, where my work life is on one side and my personal life is on the other, and both wicks are burning at max intensity. There has been no break. No rest. So the flames are getting closer and closer together now, where I imagine they will swirl into a ball of fire and explode. And then I’ll be in real trouble.

But I digress.

Frustrating NJ living situation aside, I just wish the sickness would stop. I wish the travel would stop. I wish I could spend a full month with my husband, without one of us having to leave. In about six days it’s my turn to go again, and then I’ll come back and two days later the hubby has to go, which means we’ll barely see each other for two weeks.

I miss him. I miss our life we were trying to build. I miss not having to worry about sick parents, and if someone is going to die this month. I’m just so…tired.

I used to leave a lot of space in my life for creating. But I guess in the last 5 years everything has felt too heavy…or too noisy? But also, I think I stopped creating because the world around me no longer supports creativity.

Every once in a while someone mentions my book. I’m still glad I wrote it, but it was also a project that paradoxically slammed the creativity door for me. I toiled, and yes toil is a really good word, for over 5 years on that book, and then it ended up actually costing me money in the end…for a lot of reasons I don’t have the (legal) liberty to share.

I suppose I still feel disappointed and disillusioned from that experience. I’d hoped that if publishing a book didn’t change my life and career path, it would at least pay for some part of my existence. But it didn’t even pay for a single grocery bill, so when I’d tried to write another book after that, I’d sputtered along for a few months and then finally put it away. That was almost 4 years ago and I’ve never revisited it. Not even once.

I don’t think most of us who create do it for the money, but we do at least hope to make enough to cover our basic needs. And the problem is that the culture around us doesn’t pay for it even though it says it still wants it (in the form of movies and music and tv and so on). So creativity starts to die out simply because those creative humans must then shift their energy into finding ways to survive.

The result? A lexicon of mass-produced junk powered by greedy executives that is meant to generate as much money as possible, while numbing us out to the greater depths of the world around us.

I still write for a living, which is honestly a great stroke of luck, but I don’t get to write about the important or impactful things. I write instructions for businesses whose sole goal (for the most part) is to make money. And I don’t inherently dislike it, because in my heart I’m not only a writer but also a teacher. However I don’t get to be all that creative every day.

That means I don’t get to bring light into the world, or explore what it means to be human or to be alive on this planet. I don’t get to do anything that really matters to me because my entire energy field is focused on day-to-day survival, which honestly has been a preoccupation for most of my adult life, but at this point wages have stagnated so far that it’s now literally almost my entire focus.

I know there are lots of creatives out there like me who no longer expend the energy to create, because I’m looking around in 2025 at what feels like a dystopian war scene and I’m wondering…where is all the creativity? When I revisit the literature and even TV shows from just a few decades in the past, and compare it to what we have available to us now, it seems like most mainstream creativity has evaporated. Or, probably more accurately, has been snuffed out by human greed.

Have you taken the time to notice?

I decided to sit down this morning and write something after 6 days (and counting) of being sick. Those 6 days made it hard for me to work, to breathe, to eat, to sleep. I couldn’t do much of anything except get lost in bygone forms of creativity (old tv shows, music) or lay there and think about the dumpster fire around me. And I do wonder…is creating part of my reason for being? Is creativity part of all of us? Which leads me to also wonder if I’m somehow on the wrong path again, or focusing my energy on the wrong things. Do I need to make a larger change?

I don’t have the answer for myself yet, but I do think it’s time for humanity to undergo a reset. I think we’ve become so lost as a species that it’s going to take massive amounts of suffering (and the accompanying realization of our errors) in order to right the ship – hopefully before we destroy the planet and ourselves. This includes our creative selves.

So that brings me to the question…what can each of us do to right the ship? Is creativity a part of that healing process? Maybe we’ve stopped using all of the gifts available to us, and are succumbing to inertia and a lack of inspiration, because we’re in the midst of what feels like an utterly uninspiring time to be alive. And also because so many of us can’t even afford our basic survival needs.

But maybe what humanity must invest in, instead of AI data centers that literally require copious amounts of planet-killing resources, is more art, more music, more dancing, more books. More things that remind us of what being alive is really about.

Are you ready to do your part? I think I am. What are your talents, and what do you love to do? Can you find ways to do more of it even when you’re unmotivated or beaten down? The world needs more humanity. The world needs more reminders of who we are and where we come from. The world needs more of you.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything that isn’t for work. Years, actually. And my life has been crazy during that time, with copious change, uprooting, chaos, instability, sadness, stress, sleeplessness…and also (happily) a strengthening of my bond with my husband.

But my latest shift has nothing to do with turmoil and moving again and sick parents; it has everything to do with time.

I suppose I’d started hitting a wall right around the election. Or maybe it was closer to Inauguration Day? I’m not sure really, but it’s 100% related to the transition that began in November and that accelerated in the past few months. And that wall was simply this: I was sick of it all.

I was sick of the barrage of news slapping me in the face (from my pocket or desk or sofa) multiple times a day. I was exhausted by the dismay I experienced constantly over this, and that, and also this, and also that. And the incredulity of nobody stepping in to “save the day” as it were. And also the realization that the only thing I can control, now and actually most of the time, is just me.

This means how I spend my time. How I focus my energy. How I react to things like stressful news or stressful diagnoses. It means how I choose to approach my life, what I choose to let into my world, and what I actively work to block out.

——

Late last week, I took my hubby to the airport so he could do what he needed to do. And then I came home and just sat there, looking around at this still somewhat blank apartment that has sheltered me for 6 months while also becoming a thorn in my side.

I started to observe a shift within myself that felt more strong than the copycats of the past. Part of that shift was a reminder that I cannot control anything. Not anymore, if I thought I could, and not ever, if I still had delusional aspirations of my own grandeur. But more than that, I realized I can no longer stomach all the noise. The noise of the past decade, the noise of the past year, the noise of the past few months.

All magnified and constantly thrust upon me by technology.

My phone.

Screens. Scrolling. Blips of this and vomits of that.

Sound bytes. Alarmism. Defeatism.

The crippling of my attention span and the theft of my time.

So last weekend, while I was home alone (in a state where I literally don’t know anyone, and therefore have come to depend too much on technology to fill the gaps), I decided to instead pursue a more analog existence. I was going to disallow myself to continue using technology in the same way as I had been. I would reject 2025, and the way our lives have gone since about 2012 with the invention of the smartphone, and I would seek out a more familiar way of living that kept me going through hard times over the decades prior to the iPhone.

This new way of living? It’s based on books, music, art, crafts, plants, animals, journaling, and watching my favorite old tv shows and movies in a non-byte, non-scrolling format. It’s the way I used to live, back when I had time in my life (and space in my brain) to do things like write this post.

I honestly don’t really care if anyone reads what I write now. I used to. I used to think I could change the world and that I was meant to do something big, and that writing was the way that I might do it.

Silly me. Not all of us are meant to do big things. Some of us are simply meant to be good people in a world dominated by negative energy and sleepwalkers.

And I can’t be a present human if my eyes are glued to a scroll that never ends. To videos that play one after another. To nasty arguments on Discord or Reddit between those aforementioned sleepwalkers.

I honestly thought I’d fail at this again, because I’d tried multiple times over many years to curb my use of technology. But maybe, while living in both political and personal chaos, I finally have the ammo to severely demote the smartphone and relegate it to normal usage. Or to assistive usage instead of dependency.

My life circumstances have not actually gotten any easier in the last week, and the world continues to metaphorically go down in flames around me, and yet everything has somehow become more peaceful now that I’m left to my analog outlets, the space in my brain, and the puffy clouds outside my window.