Mitch Reyes on Anxiety

The mind is wild.

Anxiety is like when you get an eyelash in your eye. At the start, it's just an innocent piece of hair and next minute it feels like a shard of glass and you think you're going to go blind.

It's hard enough living with anxiety, let alone having anxiety and being a creative.

I'm a 0 to 100 kind of guy.

What is ego? We can't see it, we can't taste it, we can't smell it and we can't touch it. It's literally nothing. But we all have an idea of who we think we are and who we think we should be.

I didn't learn sh*t from uni — I'm talking like, nothing!

I decided to let my anxiety come along for the ride with me. Not push it away, just let it be there and without letting it cripple me.

The energy that you spend inside your own head doesn't allow you to spend energy on anyone else.

Realisation: I didn't have to be a god on Instagram to be a photographer.

For most of my journey, my imagination had mustered up such a big story about what and who I should be that I had left no room to be just me.

What does it mean to be a creative? Why does it matter? Why do I have to identify with the word?

There is no silver bullet to anxiety but anxiety isn't meant to be cured it's meant to be understood.

We have well and truly lost the connection with ourselves. We spend so much time sharpening the blade of our craft, upskilling, working on how our body looks rather than how it moves and spend so much time in our minds with the stories we make up. We don't spend any time sharpening the very source that helps us understand this source which is our mind.

If you've noticed that your mind is wild, congratulations. That's awareness.

Not a good thought, not a bad thought. Just a thought. Not a good story, not a bad story. Just a story.

Our minds are discursive because of what we feed it.