Raquel Costa's Blog

These days I have felt so awfully frustrated. I always had big dreams for myself or at least a hope and a belief that great things were awaiting me and it has been so difficult feeling like I just keep knocking on doors and they keep closing in my face, one after another. I have felt super lost these last few months and there have been many nights and many days and many moments where I have just cried to God “Why is this happening to me? Why can’t I find the answer? Why is it not here yet?”. I s...

First of all, happy new year everyone! I’m sorry I haven’t published a post in so long (3-4 months? Yikes). I’ve been feeling a little lost and very internally reflective the last few months. I wonder if any of you feel the same.

There is something about the end of a year (particularly such a challenging year as 2020) and the beginning of a new year that makes us want to reassess our whole lives. I’m a great believer in setting intentions, making new year’s resolutions and listing dreams. On ...

Anxiety. Such a hot word these days, present actively in every other person’s every day vocabulary. In today’s fast-paced society, it is hardly surprising. Social media spends half of the time pumping our minds full of images of someone who’s better-looking, richer, more popular or more successful than we are. The other half of the time it pumps us with a million items or courses or holidays that would magically make our lives so much better. The current mindset of relentless consumerism is enou...

As pubs, restaurants and international flights begin to be accessible again and life starts to slowly return to normal, I feel like it is the best time to reflect on the lessons we have learned throughout this lockdown. For me at least, as well as for many people I have talked to recently, it has been a time of great personal transformation.

The coronavirus is still around and many have suffered greatly, lost their jobs and lost loved ones. It has been and in many ways continues to be an extreme...

So I know I have been on radio silence the last couple of weeks and I guess you can imagine why. I have felt deeply overwhelmed mentally and emotionally, as I think many of us have, by current events. The world seems to be turning upside down, I feel like I have no place to be traumatised but that’s exactly how I feel. I feel overwhelmed and lost, I feel like I want to help everyone, heal everyone, even save everyone but I just can’t. There are people suffering and dying and fighting all over th...

Art as vulnerability

Vulnerabilty as a word has a bad rep. When people hear the word vulnerability, they think of weakness, of being a target for pain and exploitation by an outside source. Vulnerability is rawness, it’s showing yourself without filters, it’s putting yourself on show. This is what artists do, the good ones at least.

Art is a courageous act of vulnerability: of writing, drawing, painting, knitting the colours of your soul. Of releasing the images in your brain, the dreams you can...

After a month and a half locked up I feel that I am completely and utterly losing it. I am second guessing all of my decisions (even more than usual), I feel a constant sense of dread, like at any moment some gigantic boulder is going to fall out of the sky and crush me like a crisp. I am losing my sense of who I am and what I like and I feel like I’ve had to try so hard to stay centred, to stay calm, to make sense of everything that’s happening externally in the world and internally inside my h...

Over a month has passed and I have lost count of how many days I have been at home, not going to work, not taking dancing classes, going to the gym or going to the pub. Life has been more than a little weird but I find I’m getting used to it, I feel almost numb. Not that depressive-state kind of numb, but the absent-minded, “living inside a cloud and passing through the world slowly like nothing matters” kind of numb. It’s not always a negative feeling, it is just so different. The pace of my li...

So, here is another episode of me trying to write something insightful when I feel like my whole world is crumbling into little pieces slowly like crumbs of bread spreading on the carpet that I can’t hoover out no matter what I do, that is if I had the motivation to hoover which I don’t but I feel guilty because it should be done and then maybe my world wouldn’t crumble so much but I just can’t…

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In my life, I have always chased growth, I have looked for ways to develop, to feel great, to feel ...

I feel kind of terrible that I haven’t blogged in so long, for about two weeks now. I can’t say that I’m struggling exactly but I just don’t feel…full of creative juice you might say. I miss going out and getting inspired by life before sitting down to write. Spending all day at home every day means that I draw my inspiration less from the outside world and more from deep within myself which is sometimes a scary place to be and I’m sure it is the same way for many other people.

I feel in a way t...