One of the things I love most about writing this Artist Diary is that I have no idea where it is going. I can’t wait until I’ve been doing it for a year, because I want to be able to look back and see what happened to one person, creatively and personally, over twelve months. What entered my life, what disappeared, what changed me, what influenced what I made.

I started wondering whether life influences art or whether art influences life too, and I think the longer I do this, the more I realise that the line between the two is probably much less clear than I thought.

I’ve only been writing this diary for a relatively short time, but somehow it has already become part of my everyday life. It feels a little like journaling, except I’m journaling to the world.

And because I’m writing while things are happening rather than looking back months or years later, I’m noticing something else: how many different emotions can exist in such a short period of time. There have been days when I’ve felt happy. Days when I’ve felt sad, scared, excited, curious, exhausted, peaceful, hopeful. Sometimes several of them in the same day.

Today is anger. Today I am fucking angry. I am angry about things that have happened to me over the past months. Angry about things I accepted, things I endured, boundaries that were crossed, time and energy that were taken from me. Angry about moments that I can now look back at and think: how the fuck did I have to live through that?

And something has changed in the way I deal with that feeling. I don’t immediately try to get rid of it anymore. I don’t tell myself I shouldn’t be angry. I don’t feel guilty because yesterday I was smiling and today I want to scream. I don’t think being angry means I’m going backwards. I try to let the emotion exist long enough to ask it a question: what are you trying to tell me?

I think therapy has helped me enormously with this. I started seeing my psychologist in July, although therapy itself has never been something strange or embarrassing to me.

I first went to a psychologist when I was seventeen, and throughout my life, whenever I’ve reached a point where something felt too difficult to untangle alone, I’ve asked for help. I’ve always talked about it openly because I genuinely believe psychological support can be one of the most useful things we can give ourselves. And right now it is helping me enormously. One of the things I’m learning is that maybe emotions don’t always need to be fixed. Sometimes they need to be heard.

So today I’m not trying to turn my anger into gratitude. I’m not trying to find the positive side of it. I’m not trying to make it prettier because this is an Artist Diary and anger isn’t particularly pretty. I’m just letting it be anger. Maybe tomorrow something else will arrive.

And perhaps that is one of the things this diary will eventually show me: not only what I created during one year of my life, but who I was while I was creating it. What frightened me, delighted me, hurt me, fascinated me, pissed me off. How all of those things entered the work, and how making the work changed the way I looked at all of those things in return.

And now, towards the end of the day, I can actually see what anger made me create. Today it made me want to write. Maybe because writing gives me somewhere to put an emotion when there is too much of it inside me. It allows me to take what is happening inside and put it somewhere outside of myself, in words. So I followed it. I didn’t decide what kind of art anger was supposed to produce. I just wrote because that was what I felt like doing.

And now the day is changing again. Tonight I want to finish printing the stencils on my jacket so I can move on to the next stage: embroidery. A very alternative Friday night. Just me at home, an autumn mood, the hazelnut latte candle I bought myself, hot apple and cinnamon tea, sitting on the sofa making art. And I realise that lately I really like being with myself.

Maybe I’m decompressing. After so much noise, so many external stimuli, so much emotional energy spent outside myself, there is something incredibly comforting about an evening in which nobody needs anything from me and nothing is pulling me somewhere else. I can just be here. Write when I need to write, make things when I need to make things, drink my tea, light my ridiculous hazelnut latte candle and sew something onto a jacket.

Maybe life influences art. But perhaps making art also teaches us how to look at our own life. And maybe, if I keep writing this diary long enough, I’ll eventually be able to see something I can’t see yet: what different emotions make me create. What sadness does. What happiness does. What curiosity does. What fear does. What peace does.

Today, I know what anger did.

It gave me words, ink, thread and a quiet Friday night.