Make Mistakes with Art

 One of the most important skills for those struggling with PTSD and mental health is resiliency, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and continue to function.
Society places high expectations to be perfect, which results in an ambush of our true self and a tangle of pressure to be something no one can obtain… perfection. This dynamic leads to shame, guilt, remorse, anger and a lifestyle of beating ourselves up over actions deemed mistakes.
I suggest one cure is to learn to love our mistakes as a growth step and view it as tool for creative healing. In practicing making mistakes, we learn our resiliency, humility, and core truths of our brokenness which then can be embraced in forgiveness and growth. Mistakes allow us to choose different behaviors that support our truths, thus creating better self-esteem and a clear slate of compassion to walk forward with.
Invention is often born from mistakes. The arts and creativity can act as a workbook for identifying and solving alternative methods and perspectives through making, process, materials manipulation and reworking intention. In art, if one doesn’t like what is seen, creativity provides the conduit to redo and provide a different path toward the agreeable completion of the work, thus resiliency is practiced and learned. Making mistakes is very freeing to the constraints of always being perfect and right allowing one to embrace the beautiful brokenness of being real and a human. Art is an excellent teacher for making mistakes beautiful.
My advice….go make mistakes and give yourself a pat on the back for breaking out of self-jail and needing to be perfect!