My desk this week: color studies, sketches, rewrites (2025)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
Lately, the position I find myself in most in nose to the ground, cleaning up after F’s meals. I sweep up crumbs and half-chewed banana, along with entire chunks of sandwich that have fallen out of her grinning mouth. Mine is a kid whose laughter will not wait for a bite to be chewed or properly swallowed; whose joy will not be tamed by rules or fatigue or her sister’s annoyance—whose joy is, in fact, a medicine for even-reasonable rules or well-earned fatigue or understandable annoyance; whose heart will not falter or close, even as mine does, at the state of this world.
Lately, the position I find myself in most is sleepwalking to F’s room around midnight, then two am, then three, and four. For months now she’s been wide awake when she should be sleeping, and over these past few weeks, she’s begun screaming, too. I wonder if the world’s collective anxiety seeps into her skin during the dark hours of the night, if she is so annoyed at our inability to separate wrong from right that she’s resorted to screaming.
When I lift her out of bed, she clings to me with relief. At nearly two years old, F is still a tiny thing, a baby monkey smuggling herself away in my arms. Outside of this room, beyond the walls of my home, families are bundled up and sent back to countries they don’t recognize. Others move of their own accord, to states and cities who will attempt to protect them when the rest of their country will not. Some go to school and don’t return home because their friends and neighbors believe real freedom is the power to destroy another person’s world.
Safety is a matter of luck, and I was born on the side of it that faces up—the side sunlight reaches after it travels through a thousand years of cold and darkness.
Lately, the position I find myself in most is stiff-necked, eyes closed, breathing in my kid’s presence and thinking of all the others. I breathe in her brown skin’s scent and consider what I can do—how I can transform the small marble of hardness in my own heart into something new, something that will help someone else. I breathe in my kid’s spirit and I know I can try harder. I breathe in my kid’s pulse and my heart, a temperamental old thing, slowly begins to open once more.
TUESDAY
The problems of our time are overwhelming—so much so that a paralysis can set in. Unfortunately, paralysis is just that: paralysis. It doesn’t encourage you to create change in yourself or the world, and it doesn’t allow you to help anyone else.
Helplessness stems from inaction. Commit to fostering hope within yourself by believing that your actions matter—that there is meaning in every small deed, even if it seems underwhelming. Does it feel like enough? Never. Is it better than doing nothing at all? Yes.
Operating in a state of total despair (or worse, being unable to function)doesn’t mean you see reality more clearly than those who are content.Cultivating joy within yourself despite the realities that surround you is a strength.
Ask yourself which causes align with your values. Choose a single issue that is close to your heart. Learn more about it, and slowly integrate small changes in your lifestyle that support these causes.
Learn to live with a certain amount of fear and anxiety. Remember that the presence of both indicates that you care—that you’re a thoughtful, feeling person who wants to make a difference.
—Excerpted from How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Clarity, Purpose, and Heart, my book of illustrated essays.
WEDNESDAY
“People are redefining ambition. Most of us who hit 40 have had enough experiences—winning and losing—to know that it is all actually “winning” and “losing.” The best job in the world can also cause you profound stress. Getting the promotion, raise, book deal that you always wanted, might feel like a hard-won achievement in certain ways, and in others, it is likely to be anti-climatic and send you spinning off into a moment of existential confusion. If you’ve experienced the texture of work long enough, you start to sober up about what really matters to you, what you are really made for, and what you want to spend your precious energy and time on. You understand that the deepest sense of self-realization doesn’t come through paychecks or titles, but through genuine, intrinsic pride that you have done something you are delighted by with people who delight you. Midlife is a moment to seek a more finely calibrated understanding of all of this and start advocating for yourself within work settings (whether that means joining a labor union or saying no more to freelance work or not tolerating assholes). Of course the most insecure your financial situation, and the less lucrative your life’s work, the more constraints you face on living into these truths. Which is why economic disparity is about so much more than “food on the table,” but people’s ability to give the world their best gifts and live their fullest, most realized lives.” —From Courtney Martin’s Grow Bigger, Not Bitter
THURSDAY
Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 26 July 1908
The animated legacy of Little Nemo’s walking bed: I read Little Nemo as a child; as an adult, I have a deep appreciation for Winsor McCay’s imagination and drawing ability. I find more and more that McCay’s tight lines and evocative color palette are influencing how I think about drawing and the drawings I want to make—that maybe “fun” in drawing doesn’t necessarily mean spontaneity in line or execution, but fluidity in thought and effective communication.
FRIDAY
I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.
—The World Has Need of You by Ellen Bass
See you next week!
xx,
M
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