Dear Somebody: When I change my perspective.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

I’m agitated, disappointed in myself; I thought I’d be further along by now. I need to send my final illustrations to the client by this evening, but I’m still working on the first round of sketches. The day is mapped out between daycare pick-ups and drop-offs, graduate school classes, my job, and house chores. I have an exact amount of time slotted for each task; this is how I ensure everything gets done.

My expectations crowd me. They squeeze the life out of everything I do, making it impossible for me to be present. I focus on expectations (“Creating paintings that others will adore!” “I will be happy if I stick to my rigid schedule during these unprecedented times!”) that I have little control over. Expectations are unforgiving; they reduce our feelings of ease or imagination—two ingredients necessary for thriving creativity. It’s difficult to draw well with my brain in a vice, jammed between an increasingly long to-do list and a timer waiting to go off.

I decide to replace my expectations with intentions. I can’t control what happens, but I can choose how I want to feel, and quite frankly, I’m tired of feeling disappointment each day. I say it aloud: I intend to create work that meets others where they are. I intend to try my best with the time and limits I have. I intend to be kinder to myself.

I try this for a week and notice small shifts within. I’m able to recognize my progress and feel good about it, rather than obsessing over all I haven’t achieved. I feel calmer and in control. I’m less reliant on external circumstances for satisfaction or fulfillment, knowing that although I can’t always control what happens, I can control my intentions–what I choose to see, feel, and give—and that is enough.  

—from How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Clarity, Purpose, and Heart, my book of illustrated essays

TUESDAY

It’s summer. I’m working, or trying to work, on two books currently—a new journal and a picture book. I care deeply about both. I’m knee deep in revisions for one and up to my nose in sketches for the other, and struggling to make progress on 12 hours of childcare a week. Some mornings I wake up empty—physically empty, like the engine in me has fallen out, and I know that emptiness will always find a place inside a body that is overtired. 

My work is solitary, which I love, but in this particular phase of life feels dangerously isolating. Isolation breeds self-doubt and discouragement—both are part of the territory, I know, of being an artist, but this year feels particularly prickly. It’s alarming just how negative the negative self-talk can get. How ugly can one’s self critic be? Pretty ugly. 

I’m lucky enough to recognize it, mostly, when it happens, and this week I deliberately pulled myself out from inside myself and showed up for 

Andy J. Pizza

 online pep rally, a virtual meeting of creatives, and I’m just so happy I did. Spending an hour with him and his supportive community reminded me that I’m a person, not simply a pair of hands, and I left the call feeling more human, which is what I really needed.

Right now, it’s an evening in late June. The house is quiet. I hear the crickets and wasps outside my studio window. I watch the sun fade, leisurely, to make way for moonlight. I think of myself decades from now, and wonder what future me will think of the life I live: with work that challenges and fulfills me, and a family who does the same; with a home that feels like home inside a city that doesn’t, but could, someday; with an overtired body that insists on keeping on; with a life that promises the same it does for everyone else—some constant, some change. 

I wonder if future me will miss the exhaustion and the noise: the constant running behind tiny feet, the incessant stream of questions, the tugging behind my knees when I’m cooking or working or attempting to form a thought. I wonder if future me will miss being this tired—not because it’s glamorous, but because it’s still beautiful— because it’s from giving my all, each day, to building a life that is richly, unbearably full. 

WEDNESDAY

A few things that are giving me inspiration right now:

The work of Bernadette Watts, which feels very classic. 

I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives. 

Sophie Blackall talks with Roger. 

THURSDAY

“The most important thing is the doing—integrating your life and your work and everything together.”

—Ruth Asawa

FRIDAY

As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars? I stood a while in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.

—A Work of Fiction by Louise Glück

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Letting go.

Page 150 from my book of essays, How it Feels to Find Yourself 

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

I’m reading more middle grade these days, both because it’s good reading (for the most part) and because I’d like to write a middle grade novel one day. I just finished Pax: Journey Home by Sarah Pennypacker.

On recommendation from Margaux Kent, I started reading Martyr! this week. So far, so good. I also enjoyed watching this interview with author Kaveh Akbar and Arian Moayed, where Kaveh speaks generously about how he crafted the book and what it feels like to live in the in-between, a topic I am perpetually interested in.

I pre-ordered Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray’s Becoming Little Shell and honestly can’t wait to receive it. I love Chris’s writing. It’s very clean. It’s precise. Something about it feels warm, alive. Maybe because he lives in accordance with the earth? Maybe because he writes with all of his senses? Maybe because he has a wonderful grasp on language and rhythm? Maybe because his thoughts appeal to me and give me something to reach for? Likely, all of the above. Give it a try. 

TUESDAY

Three years into motherhood, I’m just now beginning to understand why many parents are unable to separate themselves from their children. After swimming in your child’s vomit and tears for the better part of 20-something years, becoming ridiculously invested in even the most benign of their milestones (F and I are currently working on her wave), and using the better part of your brain and heart to shape theirs? After all that, it’s difficult to let go. 

As research for my own well-being, I’m reading a lot about letting go. In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle talks about how our only true reality is whatever we’re experience at this very moment. He says, “…to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is.” 

My brain knows all this but it still likes to live in the future, in a place that has never existed and never will—a place where my current grievance has disappeared and no new complaint has arrived to replace it. I want to change my brain, so I practice living in the now.

When N wakes up with the worst toddler stomach illness going around, I try to be present. Nothing I want to get done is going to happen, I say and open my arms to the now. This resignation sets me up for success. I find myself present through the tears, the laundry, the crackers, and the soup. T vacuums N’s room; I open a window and light a candle. When I walk in a few hours later, I’m overwhelmed by how beautifully clean it smells. Like a field of watered flowers ready for bloom. Not only is my nose working, but I’m paying attention to it. 

When F goes for her morning nap, I set N in front of the television and sit next to her to take notes for the essay I’m writing. After a few minutes, N announces that she’s done watching and wants to play. Right, I say, putting down my book and pen. Let’s play. We play Zingo and Genius Square. I study N’s strategy through the moves she makes. I see her concentration through her brows, but only the left one. She’s getting better at placing pieces without knocking others over. 

The day continues. F wakes up and N goes for her nap; N wakes up and F goes for her second nap. I drink a little coffee, I eat a cookie for comfort, I ask my editor for an extension on my deadline. The coffee is good, the cookie too sweet. I know my interest in sugar is emotional, so I only have one. Only occasionally do I find myself frustrated with all that is out of my control. I work on letting go.

By all measures, it’s been an ordinary Tuesday: a sick toddler, a restless baby, and two parents struggling to work from home. But as I make dinner for my family, it starts to feel a little special. It’s true that I didn’t get time to work on my assignments or keep up with my daily poem practice. It’s true that my book deadline is growing closer and closer. It’s true that there was no moment of quiet or solitude. But I did practice something notoriously difficult for me: I practiced letting go. 

Ooowee N, what a Tuesday!, I say, pouring myself a glass of wine. I read about tortoises aloud to her while smashing chickpeas and carrots for F’s screaming mouth. I don’t remember what the wine tasted like, only that it was perfect. The day is, finally, almost over. 

Mom, N says, looking at me with her big, serious eyes. I loved spending this Tuesday with you.

WEDNESDAY

I was interviewed by Avani Patel for Sahaj Kaur Kohli, MA, LGPC’s Culturally Enough, where we spoke about confidence being a skill you can build, the magic of poetry, and how so much of parenting our children is re-parenting ourselves. You can listen here. 

I haven’t shared too much about the Little Revolutions podcast episode I recorded with Freeda in London this past November, but only because I feel so many things about it and want to write about the experience properly. I hope to do that next week. In the meantime, you can listen to me and Masuma talk about redefining feminism as a mother. 

If you missed it last week, I talked with Andy J. Pizza of Creative Pep Talk about pushing through creative ruts and learning how to accept your own multiple (often competing) perspectives in Episode #438. 

THURSDAY

“HAVE FUN. I spent years focusing on skill development and losing the spark that made me feel so connected to my art. Remember that the joy is what will always drive you to make the best work—not money, success, or likes.”

—My advice to artists/my advice to myself, for Petya K. Grady’s How to Work Like An Artist. Lots of good advice from fellow artists and writers here. 

FRIDAY

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light–
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

—On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Making new paths.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

In this new year, I find myself waiting for 10:00 in the morning. I push you on the swing and you smile big, as if you swallowed the sun so its light would shine on through your face. It does. I don’t know for certain, but I imagine you feel weightless; unburdened by the demands of gravity. As if the world finally rolled backwards off your shoulders.

I carry you upstairs. First the diaper, then pajamas and a sleepsack, then back into my arms. After hours of growing teeth and army crawls, you are quiet. You drink from your bottle and pull on my hair. A chuckle escapes from your gummy smile. The light from your face speckles the wooden floors. A smattering of honey, soft and sweet. For the most part, you are happy. I see how you try to love the world. 

You fall asleep and when you do, my idling mind starts its engine once more. Which thought should I tend to first? The laundry or the meals, the manuscripts untouched. The creak of an entire house that needs a deep scrub. The emails, the phone calls, the texts waiting for response. The persistent clang of not enough. The occupation and the lives lost and the lives leaving this earth right now. All that I can’t do; all that I don’t do. 

At 9 months old, your hair is already to your shoulders. It’s a shock I love to see. The combination of coconut oil and soap reaches my nose and my head drops down to rest on yours. I hear the quivering call of a mourning dove outside my window; another bird responds. I am reminded, daily, that the earth does not need us. Nature answers itself while we remain silent. 

There are hundred-year-old trees right outside my front door. I close my eyes and they rise up around us. The light climbs higher over the winter clouds. Ghost grass grows taller; dull, deadened, sharp. I can’t see much beyond the bark engraved with age and the oldest green leaves, but you are here with me. Your breath, as great as the widest mouth of any river. My mind, finally quieter than the bottom of the sea. 

In this moment, I don’t care about all I have left to do. I breathe in your hair. I let my thoughts go. Your small body rises and falls with mine. We are cocooned. We are somewhere else. The earth cries out. It goes on without us. 

TUESDAY

I’ve spent years listening to Creative Pep Talk. I’ve often listened for hours on end— especially over the last two years in graduate school, when I often worked late nights or early mornings. Andy J. Pizza’s perspective often reassured me when I felt like an imposter, comforted me when I felt like giving up, and resonated with me when I considered (and re-considered) why I was working so hard to create a new path—and who I was doing it for. 

Naturally, I nearly lost my mind when he reached out last fall to record an episode together. On Episode #438 of Creative Pep Talk, we discuss how to push through creative ruts, escape a fixed mindset, and learn how to accept your own multiple (often competing) perspectives. 

If you listen to this episode, I’d love to hear what you think.

WEDNESDAY

In 2015, my first journal, Start Where You Are was published. I still remember how surreal it felt to finally become a published author—to have my words and drawings printed by a very real, very big publisher—to achieve a dream that I had dared to dream since I was a very young girl. 

View fullsize

View fullsize

This picture was taken sometime in 2020, I think, when Start Where You Aresurpassed 500,000 copies sold. That number is somewhere around 572,000 now. I am not confused about the success of this book. I know it has very little to do with me and much more to do with all of you—all of you who have support this book, and me, for so long. 

More importantly, it’s also a very encouraging sign of how many of us are committed to the lifelong process of exploring themselves more deeply—the effects of which we’ll see reflected back in our relationships with ourselves, our children, and—I hope, our communities. These days, that comforts me in a way little else can. 

New shelves in my studio hold some of my published books and projects.

In 2015, I felt like the luckiest person in the world to have my first book published. Two books of essays and four journals later, I still feel like the luckiest person in the world. I hope I get to make books forever. I will always try very hard to. 

THURSDAY

“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”

—from John Steinbeck’s letter to his son, Thom

FRIDAY

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

—from The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac by Mary Oliver 

*Thank you to A for sharing this poem with me this week.

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: A lesson in unconditional love.

A paint palette from How it Feels to Find Yourself

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

I wake up tired. It’s 4:35 am and our 5-month-old is crying. I sit up, swing my legs over to the edge of the bed, and stumble towards the door. Jack has been up for some time now, waiting for us to wake. He dances around my feet, tip-tapping excitedly, wanting me to sit down and play with him. “I need a minute, Jackie,” I mumble, stepping over him and into the bathroom. He watches as I brush my teeth and splash cold water on my face. I feel irritated for no reason. After a few minutes, I close the door.

By 6:00 am, the baby has been changed and fed and cried a few more times. We’re sitting on the floor playing peek-a-boo, waiting for the sun to show her face. Jack sits by the bedroom door, waiting. Every so often, he looks over to see how we’re doing.

Around 6:45, I get dressed. Jack bounces around my heels as I pull on pants and a hoodie. “Jack. Jackie. I need some space,” I say, more gently than I have before. When we reach the back door, he’s there, waiting. I let him out and he races around the yard, joyfully feeling the cool air on his face. The trees are dropping their leaves now, and the crinkle of each one fills my ears. The scent of morning dew after a long fall from the sky passes over us in waves. I breathe in deeply and will myself into feeling new. I want to be better—patient, kind, more appreciative of all the good I have. Jack walks over and sits down next to me, so closely that his body is on my feet. His head rests under my hands. He waits. 

—from ”A Lesson in Unconditional Love” in How it Feels to Find Yourself

TUESDAY

This interview with Blexbolex about The Magicians; this letter by Ruth Franklin of Ghost Stories about the purpose of art in dark times; this conversation on moving past your own self-doubt between Lizzy Stewart and Andy J. Pizza.

WEDNESDAY

Teared up reading today’s note from Courtney Martin, a letter about her daughter turning 10. I myself can hardly fathom a world in which my daughters are 10, or 11, or anything except so small. In it, she writes:

When we were driving home so slowly that day, I never could have predicted any of this—that, ironically, my firstborn would gift me with nourishing, companionable quiet, and return me to my love of solitude and art, and speak an emotional language so foreign to me it would humble me in all the right ways.

I think about this constantly—how N and F are their own mysterious beings, equipped with their own arsenal of language, philosophy, and thought. How they are not extensions of me. How I am humbled continually by how easily they find and hold onto anything good. How they do not dwell. How deeply they feel about their perceived injustices. How it’s not my job to tell them what they should think or feel, but help them find the words to articulate what they do think and feel. How it’s my job to guide them, yes, but how mostly it’s my job to stay out of their way—so they can show me, and the rest of the world, who they are. 

THURSDAY

In the very little time I have to make things, I have been trying, very hard, to make things. Sometimes this is during F’s nap. Often it is while we go on walks. I walk and write poems in my head, on my Notes app. I text lines of poems or this newsletter to myself. I try to capture what I feel in words, hoping that eventually, I’ll be able to translate it into a picture. I draw on the couch after the girls are in bed. I draw when I should be sleeping. Sometimes I draw instead of showering. 

I fret a lot—not about the time I’m losing, but about whether I’ll still want to make the things I want to make when I do have the time. Whether I’ll still feel the spark. Whether the making part of me will keep waiting for the rest of me to catch up.

Two pieces I made this year that I finally framed, ready to hang in our home.

I took the time to frame these two illustrations this week. We’re going to hang them up in our house. Each one took too long to make by any reasonable person’s standards. If I divide the amount of time it took to draw each one by the rate I was paid, it comes out to exactly nothing. If I add up the additional costs—time with my family, regular hygiene, a semblance of a social life, an earlier bedtime—things start to sound a little ridiculous. I start to feel ridiculous. I have written about this period of motherhood before.

But when I look at these two illustrations together, I see that the making part of myself is alive and well. That it is being tended to. That despite being obviously neglected, my creativity is climbing back into my life. Into where it belongs. That it is creating its own space in the places I have abandoned. That it refuses to be forgotten. That I have not left this very integral—perhaps the most integral part of myself, behind. That what’s good is slow in its making, but that the making part is very good, too. That, however slowly, my art is growing and changing, and I am, too—and that both are well worth the costs.

FRIDAY

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

—Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

xx,

M

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