Art for the Heart
As a young child, it’s unlikely that your anger will ever be taken seriously. Your parents will probably laugh at you or make jokes about you, because apparently they find the way we express our anger ‘cute’.
A friend of mine devised a method to deal with this anger, and she called it her ‘Cyclone Anger Management Page’. No, this has nothing to do with Cyclone Tauktae – she would take a piece of paper and aggressively draw cyclones (essentially scribbles) on it. I tried it myself one day, and, surprisingly, it helped a lot. At that point, we thought we had discovered this method of therapy, but we had only re-discovered it – art therapy is a scientifically verified form of therapy, used since as early as the 1940s. There are different forms of this: art psychotherapy, in which your psychologist would analyse your art to get an idea of what you are feeling inside, and simply art therapy, where you use art as a way to express your feelings and emotions, or, to put it in modern terms, as a way to ‘vent’.
I’d like to say that my art has improved since my cyclone-drawing days. A more recent encounter of mine with art therapy was a few weeks ago – I felt a sudden, inexplicable urge to paint my phone case, and so, after watching many videos, I did. And I would definitely say that it counted as a form of therapy. Watching my brush coat the clear phone case with shiny acrylic paint, dedicating my mind to focusing on the details, and listening to Dark Academia piano music, for me, was a form of therapy and mindfulness, and helped me to take my mind of everything that is going on in the world right now.
Now, I’m not saying that you need to customise a phone case for mindfulness, or even restrict yourself to just art. For you, it could be something completely different. It could be reading a book or programming a video game, writing a song, or decorating your room, but I believe that, especially during these times of quarantine and this virus, each one of us should have a hobby that makes us happy. Something that keeps us mentally and emotionally at peace.
De Omnibus Dubitandum 
Loved this piece Nainu. I find art really helps me relieve my stress and anxiety- it actually helps me zone out, which is a big plus these days.
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