art and anxiety

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Not sure if this is the right area for this post but anyway. I viewed another post that discussed this and that I could relate to so if there is repetition, I apologize. But there are some things that are specific to my problem that I was wondering if anyone had similar experiences or advice.
I suffer from anxiety anyway from life stresses and traumas. I don't know if one anxiety is having a ripple effect but every area of my life seems to present itself with an anxiety specifically related to that- e.g. looking after myself, going out into town, socializing, drawing or art in general, memories, spending time with family and friends, college, future.

I am doing an illustration course at college. It is a two year course and I am repeating my first year. I am now doing the first year over two years so that means I am only doing half the modules. I am very slow to progress through life and this goes for my art as well. I am not the person that has been drawing my whole life- I only really discovered my interest in the last five years. I have a lot of catching up to do. But now I couldn't see myself doing anything else. For some reason though, drawing and painting causes intense anxiety. I am trying to find out why so I can work on fixing it but it is proving very difficult. All I know is it really really slows me down which is causing problems with meeting deadlines for college. I know I am a perfectionist and I thought it might be that but now I am not so sure, I have a million different thoughts going through my head.
I do have a tendency to theorize what is essentially a practical activity- I need to have an understanding of what I am trying to achieve and I find it a lot easier to understand after meticulously reading than to understand through pure practice. I have tried the latter and that caused even more anxiety. My best work is copying someone else's- that's when I feel most at ease but when tying to draw from life or create my own pieces I lack the knowledge and skill- mostly skill to pull it off. I tell myself that I am doing fine but once the anxiety starts I find it extremely hard to work through. In the process of an illustration I would spend more time procrastinating and trying to work up the courage to draw or work through anxiety. The thing is, I know I have the talent, it's taken me five years but I am really starting to believe that but I really have to drag it out- what should take me 15 minutes takes me nearly half a day because it takes me a long long time to get control.

This has become a particular problem as my anxiety in general has gotten worse. Everything in my life causes some difficulty which is making me lose hope and art is among them even though it is what is keeping me ticking at the moment. I'm half considering getting my anxiety meds increased or changed because anxiety is inhibiting on what I really really want to do.

I had similar problems with my art; productivity delays due to obsessing over perfectionism and a great deal of anxiety throughout the creative process. I never seemed to be satisfied with how things ended up on the page, even after I was working commercially in an animation studio. But everything changed after I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctkRwRDdajo[/youtube]

That and a great piece of advice from one of my favourite teachers: inside of every artist is 10,000 crappy drawings that we need to get out of our system before we can get to the good ones. So love your crappy drawings because they're part of the journey towards finding your "style/voice."

I had this same problem with my writing. Should I or shouldn't I copy others(not plagiarism, see TVTropes), and it must be perfect, and then I slowly got to the point where I could handle it being imperfect. It did take a while for me. We're talking of a decade of attempting to write. And I had some issues from my childhood that I had to get over to with writing. But now I can write, even if it is sh***y writing, or good writing, or whatever. I no longer get anxiety. As to the how, I think it was just not giving up and after wearing away my worries, that they weren't important, the anxiety over imperfections, and whether I was or wasn't copying others went away.

On a side note, I also get anxiety when I am unable to finish a project, which I've got right now. It's not actually me that the problem is with though. It's the environment. I live in a one bedroom apartment and it has craptastic ventilation. Currently winter outside, cold temps, and . I need to matte finish a bunch of miniatures I've painted, only you aren't supposed to breath that stuff, so I can only do it outside. Right now there is too much moisture outside with too cold a temp to get it to work right. It comes out glossy. Similarly with my pyrography. I have a number of things with the pattern burned in, ready for stain and sealing. Can't do it inside. Can't do that outside. So that's on hold. Got a shield prop I need to get finished. Again, my apartment isn't the place I can do some of the work such as sawing and then later painting and staining. And so I'm stuck with these things hanging over my head eating away at me and I can't complete them.

i got issues with anxiety too .. these days i try to make artworking into instead being my inner 3yo .. playing in the sandbox .. safe small-scale messy exploring and playfulness .. lots of breaks .. keep things open ended and untidy .. uncool unimpressive and mildly chaotic