Break Time — Krissanthemum — The Grey Estates

Break Time is a feature on TGE that explores how those in the music industry practice self-care. For this edition, we’re excited to welcome Krissanthemum. She’ll release her EP, Safe In My Garden, on 7/3. Bandcamp purchase receipts from ACNH players can be sent to krissanthemumsgarden@gmail.com in exchange for an in game delivery/pick-up of hybrid flowers, wreaths, crowns and more goodies.

Tell me about your self care practice, particularly when it comes to Animal Crossing? And, beyond that, how else are you practicing self care?

Music creation and keeping up to date with my friends is what makes me feel best. The time in between is often disrupted by anxiety over hypothetical consequences for being “unproductive”. As someone who struggles to embrace the benefits of relaxation, Animal Crossing has allowed me to slowly detach from a fixation with creating unnecessary work for myself.

The satisfaction of completing a never-ending to-do list on my Animal Crossing island is there without the anguish of prioritizing work deadlines alongside real life responsibilities. Many of my friends are also enjoying AC at the moment and we can voice chat and visit each other in game. It's the perfect balance of my self-care needs in quarantine. My favorite task has been collecting the abundance of rare materials needed to build the notorious DIY robot. This is the kind of patience I want to have going into my next musical project, finding peace in the fact that some productivity will still happen along the way as I find inspiration in rest. Self-care is built into Animal Crossing through its simple mechanics, preset to-do lists, and charming dialog!

How do you make the time for self care? And when you're practicing it, what does it look like for you? Do you turn off your phone? Do you have a room you go to?

Sometimes music creation feels like self-care, and sometimes it’s a cause of stress, but either way it’s something I’m committed to. I mark designated studio time in my weekly calendar and remain pretty loyal to it. In January, when we first began to discuss the relation between self-care and Animal Crossing, I was deep into mixing my upcoming EP and was looking forward to the game’s March 20th release as a hard deadline for myself to get out of the studio and hand it over for mastering. It can be really difficult to decide when it’s time to stop working on a project but at this point, I could feel the burnout and knew Animal Crossing’s gameplay was designed to help me unwind. Rest needed to become a priority over studio time for the sake of mental clarity and making room for new perspective. I am happy to be nesting in my room at the moment. Since socializing is now limited to communicating through the phone and internet, and playing Animal Crossing is both a way to socialize and relax, self-care is luckily happening amidst free time otherwise consumed by keeping up with the news and its heavy emotional effects.

We’re all on different schedules, so I love how technology allows my friends and I to reply and reach out to each other on our own time. Our responses don’t have to be face to face or immediate. When we sync up and start replying in real time, my close friends and I often switch to facetime. My phone is essential for self-care and my appreciation for facetime moments over the past couple of years became the theme of a few songs on the upcoming EP, including its single “Let Me Tell You About This Thing That Happened”.

What advice would you give someone looking to incorporate self-care into their daily routine? And what's more, playing video games might not be seen as a traditional method of self care, so do you think that anything that brings you pleasure should be considered as such?

If a self-care habit is a part of a daily routine it can’t always require a significant amount of time, emotion, energy or concentration because that all varies day to day. I’m not sure if I practice self-care everyday, but it’s definitely habitual behavior. I can sit down and talk with a friend for hours or leave a short message. I can spend an entire Saturday creating a new song top to bottom or I can do some active listening on my morning commute and hum a melody into my memos app while I’m drifting off to sleep. I can spend 5 minutes just checking what's for sale in the shops in Animal Crossing or spend a night deforesting an entire island to catch expensive tarantulas. Video games like Animal Crossing have the ability to satisfy my anxious need to be productive so I can relax. If your actions have no negative impact and leave you better off physically or mentally, that’s self-care.

Why do you feel that making time for self care is so important? What benefits do you see in making that time for yourself?

Making time for self-care is important because when life is overwhelmed with negativity, sometimes the only source of positivity you can fall back on is self-care. The more familiar you are with self-care, the more you can rely on yourself to put those practices to use when you are in need of a pick me up. My friends and I have a mutual understanding that our free moments usually happen at different times, and that there are ways to reach out and stay up to date and build each other up through independent acts of self-care. Recently, a good friend started sending voice memos, her own “podcast”, where she rants about her day and shares advice or experiences that could help us out. The latest one was about how she managed her anger in a moment of frustration. Keeping us all updated on her own time made her feel better, and once we all had the chance to listen, we felt better off too!

How are you getting through this time, aside from Animal Crossing? And what words of encouragement would you share with readers?

I’m mainly practicing guitar and piano repertoire outside of my current skill range; it’s a challenge but it’s not frustrating because I’m intentionally picking repertoire that I know will take forever to get right. I struggled to find consistent practice time before quarantine so I keep telling myself I’ve got that to be thankful for. That’s been the main thing besides Animal Crossing that is time consuming and distracting enough to allow my mind to shift away from outside negativity. To help with focus, I usually practice with a loop of some kind of ambient noise, rain or nature sounds playing in the background. If I get a little better each time, once I’m back outside, I’m going to be a shredder!!! I encourage readers to find something they can work on a little bit every day. There’s a lot of stillness right now so it’s easier to spot the slight growth and improvement when it happens.