HEALTH & BEAUTY: Crafting For Health

According to a poll conducted by mental health provider Turning Point in January 2010, three quarters of the UK population experience depression occasionally or regularly. Many in the handmade community already know of the therapeutic health benefits of crafting, designing and making. Not only does crafting lend itself to any budget, the sheer variety of choice makes crafting the perfect way to find new outlets and fill the dark void health problems can leave in their wake. Today, one of the UK Handmade team bravely shares her own battle against depression and how crafting has helped her through.

I still find it difficult to get out of bed, not just because it is winter and the cold, dark mornings tell my body it should hibernate, but because I suffer from depression. Sleep is where I hide from myself; it is not a manic depression, or even a serious one, it is a 'malaise' - a greasy flannel of feeling that lies, damp and heavy on top of my soul. I have always 'been good at making things' as they say, but I never knew that, one day, it would be the thing to save me and my marriage.

The depressed mind is a strange beast, it races around, searching for something to latch on to, to anchor it, as it rides its private storm of itching thoughts and nuisances. Without something to occupy the mind, mine can start to count: stair steps, footsteps or just random numbers marching through my head. It finds anything, or anyone, to latch on to and obsess over; set for a course of destructive, emotional behavioural patterns whilst all the time wearing blinkers. I look back and realise that my entire childhood and growing up was hounded by my own "self". It was exhausting, debilitating and when, at age 39, I found myself weeping into the supermarket trolley because I had to go back three aisles to get another onion, I went to the doctors and said, "I have a lovely house, three great children, a lovely husband, so why do I feel so terrible all the time?" He pushed the tissues at me and said, "I think you are depressed".

Antidepressants changed my life, for better and worse. I had to deal with feeling that my entire, exhausting life could have been avoided if only I could had taken a tiny white tablet once a day. The counting stopped, the general feeling of inertia stopped, I stayed awake all day but the obsessive, destructive behaviour remained. My dosage was too high, I was euphoric; I felt ecstatic, everything seemed possible and I embarked on the kind of behaviour that leaves a marriage in tatters and it did. My oldest friend had started to paint wooden decorations and tentatively sell them and asked me if I wanted to join her, so I did and took over as I am want to do. My intensity can leave people in my wake. Her hectic life meant that she couldn't carry on with it and I formed Half an Acre on my own; a new obsession was born.

It has taken me 42 years to realise that I am obsessive and always will be. Which is why, when I do something, I do it intensely and to its end. If I can keep my brain hooked on to it, that is.

At last I have found something to anchor me to my life. I am hooked.....hooked on designing, creating and making, hooked on my on-line businesses "Widget and Friends" and "Half an Acre". I'm obsessed with promoting, marketing, finding out about things, meeting other makers and it has saved me and my marriage. All my obsessive energies are channeled into what I do.

At first I was afraid it would all vanish and my mind would be searching for something else to get its claws into but it hasn't! Oh, the wonderous feeling it gives me; I have books to read on websites and search engines (a minor obsession), I am teaching myself to crochet, I have bunnies to make, blogs to write, crafty people to catch up with and things to paint. I have my tax return to do! and, what is best of all, is that I am good at it. Yes, I really am.

Was it worth those miserable, troubling years to get to this point? I can't say. I resent what depression and all its manifestations has robbed me of - my anxious childhood, the mania of  teen years, the breakdown of my family life. When things were at their worst I wouldl sleep all day, and then sleep all night too. I haven't done that for a long time ... I  don't have time, I have things to sew! I can safely say that crafting has saved my life, literally.

And I still have a lovely home, three great children and the same fabulous husband.....as well as two grey bunnies and two fish but no dog.....Yet!

To find out more about Anna and her work, visit the Bunnymaker's Blog:

http://thebunnymaker.blogspot.com/