GROUNDS MY MIND DURING THE MOMENT
I’ve mentioned (very often) in previous blogs that I almost always have to ground and stabilise my thoughts and feelings. Whenever I experience anxiety from unexpected disruptions throughout the day, things not going according to schedule, and unsettling flashbacks, I’m obliged to do activities that re-adjust my mindset. These activities mostly involve creative projects, such as building places in Minecraft as well as doing mindfulness colouring.
Every time I’m building replicas of the world’s Disney parks (as exact as I can possibly make them), my support workers and therapists ask me about how I would feel if the Minecraft server deleted what I had created. This they say is because so much time and attention to detail is involved in my projects. Yet the response I give always surprises people at first.
The sole purpose for me creating detailed Minecraft replicas of places is purely and simply to ground my feelings and stabilise my mind. Whatever happens to the file itself is irrelevant. All that matters is that the process of immersing myself in the details of the project transports my mind into a world of happiness. That activity enables me to cope with life in the present moment, and therefore I’m then able to get all of my daily necessities completed. Even if the creation gets wiped out of my iCloud (which has actually happened before), I’m still fully satisfied with everything that I gained from the project. The reason for this is because the activity itself enabled me to cope with my day-to-day life.
It’s very much the same situation with the mindfulness colouring that I do. Back in 2015 my sister gifted me the first of the adult Harry Potter colouring books. I had discovered that doing casual colouring is very effective with stabilising my thoughts and feelings, whenever I feel overwhelmed. So from that moment on, it has become an important daily activity for me.
Over the years I have gathered many other colouring books (featuring images related to various genres), and I have also created several colouring pages of my own from apps like Colorscape and Coloring Book Hero. Colorscape is an app that turns photos into colouring pages, and Coloring Book Hero is a ChatGPT app which creates colouring pages from any description of one’s choice. Whenever I make colouring pages from those two apps, I can either colour them in digitally (on my iPad) or I can print them out onto paper.
Eventually there does come a time when I have to discard colouring pages or even books, due to the amount of storage space that would be required to keep them all. However it’s exactly the same story for this as it is for my creations on Minecraft. The purpose of the activity is to ground my mind while I’m feeling stressed and/or overwhelmed in the present moment.
Though, after saying all of that, I do have to mention one very small thing. When we practice or study an activity for such a long time, inevitably we will gain a lot of knowledge and skills in that particular area. So that does mean that an additional thing I end up taking away from Minecraft (and mindfulness colouring) is experience with creating visual artwork. An area of life in which this helps me a lot is when I’m drawing material for my next (and future) published book, My Life in Sketches.
However, contrary to what many people have suggested, it’s definitely not my goal to make a career out of Minecraft building. It’s essentially for mindfulness only. In truth, my hands are well and truly full with the large amount of careers that I already do have!