554 - Get Back to Creativity that Actually Helps Your Mental Health with Gemma Correll

Creative Pep Talk

Arts, Education, Business, Design

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2026

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Pre-Order My New Book “Mysterious Things” and Help Us Spread the Word: invisiblethings.co --- Most of us start making things because on some level it feels good! It feels like a meditation. It brings flow. It helps us process. But if you ever get serious about your work, you may also accidentally lose all these positives and replace them with negative side effects like pressure, anxiety, and even despair. If you want to get back to the kind of creative practice that lifts you up instead of triggers you, this episode is for you! Gemma Correll is a world-renowned illustrator and cartoonist with one of the most personal and practical creative practices that I know of. She has been art journaling way before it was cool, and it’s turned into a cathartic experience that she now shares with the world through her online comics and now her phenomenal graphic memoir “Anxietyland”. We discuss: 1 - How to access that energy of making just for yourself before you think about anyone else. 2 - The power and pitfalls of mixing creativity with your mental health. 3 - What type of creative community we hope to see evolve in a post-social media-centric world. SHOW NOTES: Gemma Correllhttps://www.gemmacorrell.comAnxietyland by Gemma Correllhttps://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Anxietyland/Gemma-Correll/9781668004159 Producer / Editor: Sophie Miller http://sophiemiller.coAudio Editing / Sound Design: Conner Jones http://pendingbeautiful.coSoundtrack / Theme Song: Yoni Wolf / WHY? http://whywithaquestionmark.comSpotify Playlist of WHY? Songs Used on This Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ZIE7PHG5I1Ddg1BuVGRzj?si=4x_BzDZjQgqSpoaLXdVACgπ=h4HsIKG0SP6Kg SPONSORS:SQUARESPACEHead to https://www.squarespace.com/PEPTALK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code PEPTALK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Is your creative practice helping or hurting you?
0:05.0	This is a weird question because I don't know about you, but for me,
0:10.0	creativity definitely started in a place where it was about helping me cope with boring things,
0:16.0	having fun, processing stuff.
0:18.0	Like it was, its purpose was very pro mental health.
0:22.2	And then the more seriously I took my creative practice, the more that that thing kind of
0:29.3	became imbalanced, where there are lots of times where my relationship to my creativity
0:34.0	has all this pressure or all this identity wrapped up in it and it can turn into
0:38.9	something that really eats away at my mental health. And so today I'm super pumped to talk to
0:44.6	Jimma Corell, who wrote this book, Anxiety Land, wrote and illustrated this graphic memoir. But
0:52.4	Jimma is somebody who I think of as an artist
0:56.1	that is deeply in touch with making art for herself. She's someone that I've known for a long
1:02.7	time all the way back 2007-ish maybe. We both went to art school in the UK. She's actually
1:09.1	British. I'm American. Now, she lives in America.
1:12.4	But I've known her for a long time, and I've known that she has this personal creative
1:17.7	practice of art journaling and really getting all of this out of her head and onto the page.
1:22.6	And so I was thrilled to hear that she had this book coming out and that we could have a conversation
1:28.2	about all of this and what she's learned, both from doing that in her own time, then turning
1:33.8	that into a career and then turning that into a book. If you don't know Jim O'Corell,
1:37.7	what the heck are you doing, man? She is a legend in the illustration, creative space, and also
1:42.7	just the world, like, hey, the quotes on the
1:45.3	back of this book, we've got Maria Bamford, stand-up comedian, says, get Gemma's work in your life
	...

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