"I'm an NHS doctor teaching people calligraphy in my spare time"
Sneha Narayan is an NHS doctor working directly with COVID-19 patients. In her spare time, she has been creating Instagram tutorials on calligraphy, her other big passion outside of medicine, to provide respite for anyone at home struggling with lockdown. Here, she tells about the importance of creativity in times of crisis and how her hobby has provided her with the calmness and escapism she so needs right now.
I discovered calligraphy about two-and-a-half years ago at a time when I was going through a lot personally. I was struggling to sleep... life didn’t feel bright. I’d seen calligraphy tutorials on YouTube and thought that it looked fun, so it’s always been at the back of my mind. I just loved how beautiful the final results were.
It was around that period when a close friend asked me for some help in designing her wedding invites, so that gave me the drive to get started and learn what I’d always wanted to. I bought a very basic £10 calligraphy kit from a local crafts store and started teaching myself using free online videos. Every night before bed, I stuck to a routine where I’d put on a calming playlist, light a candle, make a herbal tea and idly doodle some words on paper and try to emulate what other calligraphers were doing. The more I did it, the more I found myself immersed in how meditative it was. I started sleeping better. I knew then that I’d found something that was my escape and it became my saving grace whenever I’ve gone through hard times.
My first few attempts were quite frankly laughable. I struggled to pick up the basics initially, but the tutorials helped and after one to two months of practice my calligraphy started to look a lot more presentable and I had already started to help a friend write down a few words for her wedding invite. I wrote another friend’s wedding reading for her and gave it to her as a wedding gift and I shared that on Facebook and from there someone contacted me and asked if I’d consider doing their wedding save-the-dates. Three months in, I set up my own Instagram page @paintpotsandquills dedicated to calligraphy and I started working with brands that resonated with me. Oliver Bonas was my first event and I did live calligraphy for their spring/summer 2019 launch where I wrote out self-love mantras for attendees. I did another event with jewellery label Astrid and Miyu where we created our own Christmas wrapping paper using the practice sheets.
It was at that point that I started receiving more commissions, including one from Cannes Film Festival who asked me to be their on-site calligrapher. I still can’t believe I was flown out to Cannes and was paid to write Tom Jones’ name. It will always be a pinch-me moment for something that just started as just a hobby with a kit that cost me £10.
Switching off has become that bit more important to me over the past few months. I am currently in my second year of specialist (ACCS) training, working as a senior house officer (SHO) on the anaesthetics and intensive care team. The wards have been significantly busier than normal. We continue to deal with everyday emergencies such as strokes, heart attacks, major trauma, and emergency surgery. However, we have seen an increasing number of COVID-19 cases in the hospital and we have faced an unprecedented demand especially for respiratory and intensive care support. We have definitely seen the beneficial impact of social-isolation, and felt the collective unity as the country helped ease the pressure on the NHS.
Everyone has had to step out of their comfort zones. There are nurses and doctors that have changed specialties to match demand, and everyone in the hospital has moved onto working flexible hours to avoid gaps where possible. The biggest challenges have been emotional. As intensive care doctors, we are used to dealing with the most critically unwell patients in the hospital, but during this pandemic we have seen a lot more of that. Patients are unable to have family visit them to prevent spread of the virus. It really is hard being unwell without your loved ones near you, to hold you and to tell you it'll all be OK. Beyond medical care, the staff have had to step in to help ease this void and have been brilliant in doing so. This coupled with not being able to visit my own family, which is usually my reprieve away from work, has been my biggest challenge.
Calligraphy enables to me to switch off completely because of the concentration and hand eye coordination that it requires. It forces your brain to divert away from everything else. I struggle to do breathing exercises or to meditate when I’m really anxious – my brain won’t calm, but it happens so naturally in calligraphy. It’s akin to being mindful, that habitual process of redirecting your focus and your thoughts to just putting pen to paper. It stops me from dwelling on anything else.
There was a time at the start of the pandemic that I became completely immersed in my work and I forgot what I do to unwind. I was just giving the change in situation my undivided attention. At that point, I really felt something was missing – it was like a withdrawal. I was so tired when I got home, that I’d just eat and go to sleep. When I did finally share my first calligraphy Instagram tutorial after that point, I received a huge response from people who were furloughed or at home. That became a motivation. Social isolation is very important for me in my job. I see almost the worse of COVID-19 when I’m at work and I’m aware that self-isolation is the only thing that can stop my reality from becoming harder.
For me, the motivation is helping people stay at home by cultivating a hobby, so they don’t become fatigued with self-isolation. Sometimes at work, despite all our best efforts, there isn’t always a way of saving a patient and that makes me feel incredibly helpless. You can work so hard and sometimes that still isn’t enough to help someone get better. When I’m doing my tutorials, I’m doing something to actively help people stay at home, even if it is just a small drop in the ocean. That means they’re not outside spreading it to someone vulnerable, which means that person won’t end up on my intensive care unit in two weeks’ time. It gives me life and another sense of purpose. I’m going to work and using my skills in whatever way I can there, but if I have more skills that can help in these awful few months that have turned all our lives upside down, then it’s worth my time.
A post shared by Sneha | calligraphy + design 🍃 (@paintpotsandquills) on May 14, 2020 at 8:09am PDT
I’ve changed the type of tutorials I do to better service people at home – for example, the type of calligraphy you can do with any sort of pen you have lying around, or calligraphy that you can do with children. I’ve collaborated with a few different brands on designs so that people can download the template at home and trace it off their screen if they need to. The biggest feedback I’ve had is how calming calligraphy can be. A lot of people have struggled with mental health issues during lockdown and this can give them anxiety relief.
More than anything, I wanted to spread the word that calligraphy exists. It’s not an art form that is out of reach. It’s not something you have to be really good at from the start – you don’t need to have a certain skill set to start with. Unlike with other art forms, you don’t need to have a clear image of how it should look at the end. You just need words - it can be our name, someone else’s name or even a song lyric. You can create art prints for your house. You can write a letter or a note to one another. Brides-to-be are now using the tutorials to do their own invites or envelopes – it stops them feeling so stuck with their wedding plans now on hold. Other things I’ve done including making little labels for my spice jars.
Talking about this today, I’ve completely forgotten about my last two shifts. The importance of creativity is embedded in the fundamentals in being comfortable in the flow of the unknown. Most creative people do it because they enjoy the process, not because they enjoy the end result. Those people often apply that same mindset in life - when they’re thrown in a difficult time like the current period we’re living through, it allows them to focus on the present and not to get overwhelmed by the bigger picture. When children sit down with a messy paint pot and just their fingers as a brush, they’re not worrying about the end result, they’re just enjoying the process. Children don’t worry about the end result of anything, they live in the present. As adults, we suddenly become very focused on perfection and control and it’s those same emotions that often lead to anxiety and stress. Calligraphy and art bring that inner children out. Creativity enables you to laugh of yourself and that’s so important at times like these.
As told to Ella Alexander
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