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Meera Lee Patel

ARTIST, WRITER, BOOK MAKER
  • Learn to Let Go
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Dear Somebody: The only book worth writing.

September 19, 2025

Favorite warning (London, 2025)

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

MONDAY 

After our usual English breakfast, we start a long, leisurely walk to Bishop’s Park along the river. I’m meeting V, a fellow writer (and editor), for the first time. We first entered each other’s orbit nearly a decade ago, when she commented on an Instagram post of one of my books. I was honored then, as I am now, to have my work read by someone I so deeply admire. 

I drag the kids along, half-pulling N, half-carrying F. We left plenty of time to walk, but the children pause to kiss every dog and wave at every gull and before I know it, I’m already late, nowhere near the park.  Go on ahead, T tells me, and I do, half-walking and half-running, now pulling myself along faster than my feet prepared for. 

Gulls congregating along River Thames (2025)

When I finally arrive, we get drinks and move over to a bench facing the river. After the initial few moments, we fall into conversation quickly and easily. I am so comfortable with this stranger, in fact, that although it gushes a mere few feet away, I never look away from V and back towards the river. Not once. 

I am reminded, once again, about how expansive life becomes when I allow others in—how, no matter how small or routine my life may feel at any particular moment, opening myself up to the right person will immediately buoy it. The right person reminds me of my own possibility, my own effervescence, my own value. The right person reminds me that the right people are worth the effort: the hundreds of lackluster coffees and playdates and one-sided creative collaborations that led me, eventually, to this moment in Bishop’s Park. 

For two hours, I am engulfed in conversation with another creative, another mother, another writer who I don’t have to explain myself to—because she already knows. For two hours, my brain buzzes with interest, with joy. I am invigorated in a way only possible when sharing meaningful conversation: when the conversation itself is the meal, the food and drink and river all forgotten. All this from a chance meeting with a stranger? All this from a comment on an Instagram post many moons ago? All this from a text message, a kind word, a hello? All this. 

T and the kids arrive to collect me. I sign books for V’s friends and daughter, I place the gift she’s brought me—a prescription bottle of poetry, labeled A Room of One’s Own, in my bag. Hugs are exchanged, letters are promised, and I walk away satiated, wondering if this the beginning of a new friendship.

It’s now been four weeks since our time together in the park; I think of V often. At this age, there is so much space and strangeness between me and anybody else, lifetimes of moments and memories that we’ll never share. How do new friendships begin? How do they sustain when so much life has already been lived? V lives in london, I live in Saint Louis. Her daughter began college this fall; mine beg me to ensure no monsters take them away. Our day-to-day lives? Different. Our faces and brains and cultures? Different. Our upbringings? Our thoughts and fears and desires? Different, different, different. Life is a series of unfinished roads, dozens of bricks piled up and forgotten. 

A gift from V: A prescription from The Poetry Pharmacy (2025)

A month to the day I placed the bottle of poems inside my bag, I finally open it. The pill I shake out is indigo, my favorite color. It’s a quote by Hélène Cixous, that reads: The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed.”

Poetry prescription from my bottle of medicine (2025)

I know this is true of my work and I want it to be true of my life. After all, what’s the difference between writing a book and writing a friendship? Both require a little bit of vulnerability. Both require a knock. Both require you to stand at the door, asking to be let in. I’m afraid of many things, but I know that fear is a costume that courage wears often—so I pick up my pencil and begin to write.

TUESDAY

I’ve recently seen the cyanometer, an instrument for measuring blueness, make its rounds on the internet. It was invented by Horace Benedict de Saussure, a Swiss physicist and mountain climber in 1789. 

I was reminded of Sophie Blackall’s recent creations of her own four cyanometers, which she used to measure the blueness of the sea. I don’t know what to call it, but I’d like to make a meter to measure the color of clouds. 

WEDNESDAY

My Start Where You Are 2026 weekly planners and wall calendars (2025)

For those of you who haven’t seen, my 2026 wall calendar and weekly planners are now available, and they are bright, lovely, and a joy to use. This will be my last calendar collection, so if you’ve been wanting to hang a calendar of mine, now’s the time to grab one.

You can order them directly from Andrews McMeel/Amber Lotus Publishing or in my BuyOlympia shop, as well as your local book shop or Amazon. 

THURSDAY

I haven’t recorded a podcast in a few years now, so it was especially enjoyable to break my recording fast with a really, really lovely conversation with designer and author Radim Malinic. 

We discuss all things creativity and books, but I especially loved how easy it was to sink into a meaningful conversation about letting go: life is a continual series of transformations—and if you’re going to grow, you have to let go of the person you used to be. You can listen to the episode here. 

A bonus episode, that focuses on a few especially meaningful moments (including my belief that letting go isn’t something you do, it’s simply the byproduct of acceptance) is available here. 

My gratitude to Radim for having me on, and for such a pleasurable conversation. And! If you haven’t already, you can pre-order Learn to Let Go: A Journal for New Beginnings. 

FRIDAY

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

—Paul Robeson by Gwendolyn Brooks


A year ago, these were the five things I most wanted to remember:

Dear Somebody: Losing a Penguin (September 20, 2024)


See you next week!

xx,

M


To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

In Process Tags London, Traveling, Travel, The Poetry Pharmacy, Poetry, Poem, Hélène Cixous, cyanometer, Horace Benedict de Saussure, Sophie Blackall, Start Where You Are, planner, wall calendar, Amber Lotus Publishing, Andrews McMeel, BuyOlympia, Podcast, Radim Malinic, Learn to Let Go, Gwendolyn Brooks
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Dear Somebody: I'm on my way.

September 12, 2025

River Thames (London, 2025)

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

MONDAY 

After our standard London breakfast (coffee from Tamp, chocolate croissant from Gail’s, a banana from the street vendor) we walk to the train and board for Blackfriars. We’re going to Tate Modern to meet Honee, a friend I made in 2022 when she attended our Visual Journaling retreat in the south of France. 

I haven’t seen her since then, but our time together feels easy. We catch up on our present lives and then we visit our past ones: I learn about her childhood and upbringing, we exchange notes on our familial relationships, on art-making, on daily evolution. When we hug goodbye, it doesn’t feel like it’ll be for the last time. 

Afterwards, I meet up with T and the girls and we venture into the Tate Modern bookstore. I haven’t stepped inside this gorgeous room since 2019, and the selection is always so tempting: dozens and dozens of beautiful books, all of which I want to purchase and take back home. 

T immediately spots Start Where You Are on the shelves and excitedly shows our girls. He makes such a big deal out of it that I feel sheepish. I feel demure—after all, it’s been a full decade since this, my first book, was published—does it still deserve such fanfare? My relationship with deserve is a sticky one, conflated with dangerous notions of self-worth and how I must earn it. 

Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration (2015!)

It’s been 10 years since Start Where You Are was published—with well over a million copies in print, it’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, has been translated into a dozen languages, and continues to help people all over this earth learn more about themselves. Seeing that it’s still stocked in one of the most prestigious museums in the world, a decade later, is validating. 

Finding Start Where You Are at Tate Moden with N and F :) (2025)

This book changed my life. It began my career as an author; it invited me into the world of publishing—and allowed me to build my life around my love of books; it gave me my first real reason to take a chance on me. It has a very dear place in my heart, and if I consider it quite clearly, it’s disappointing to know that over time, I have learned to push all of my achievements away. 

Luckily, T forces me to recognize my success, regularly, and for that I am grateful. Celebrating this book with my young girls is beautiful. I’m grateful for the chance to show them, first hand, that making things from the heart, with honesty and integrity, can take you to incredible places—to places that once, they weren’t even allowed to go. 

I want to raise young girls who don’t feel the constant need to minimize their achievements, and believing that I deserve good things is fundamental for doing that. Believing that I deserve good things is hard—but I’m on my way. 

TUESDAY

I’m On My Way by Ben Kweller, obviously, for the aforementioned reasons. 

WEDNESDAY

A peek into N’s London sketchbook, which was made inside an actual sketchbook but also on various paper menus throughout the neighborhood. This one, that she made while we had lunch at Franco Manca’s with a dear old friend, is one of my favorites:

N’s London sketchbook (2025)

THURSDAY

A few sketchbook pages from my time in London, including (in order): St. James’ park, colors as memories, the girls walking to Homefield Park, N in front of a cobbled doorway, and the greens of London.

London sketchbook (2025)

London sketchbook (2025)

FRIDAY

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

—You Reading This, Be Ready by William Stafford


A year ago, these were the five things I most wanted to remember:

Dear Somebody: I am not a machine. (September 6, 2024)
Dear Somebody: Losing a penguin. (September 20, 2024)


See you next week!

xx,

M


To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

In Life, Sketchbook Tags Sketchbook, Traveling, Travel, London, Parenting, Parenthood, Tate Modern, Start Where You Are, Ben Kweller, William Stafford
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Dear Somebody: A field guide.

April 11, 2025

Sketchbook from the week of April 6th (2025)

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

MONDAY 

It’s been almost a year since F regularly slept through the night. Once a duck, quietly quacking to herself, her brain has blossomed in the months since—skyrocketed even, awakened by the world and the possibility in each moment. Even her sleep has sensorial needs, and at all hours of the night she asks for more: more engagement, more stimulation, more. 

At 12:30 am, she begins chanting her own name. Refusing to look at the camera monitor, I instead imagine the early birthday party she’s throwing for herself: moonlight streamers, a parade of stuffies rolling around with her—a celebration of the spectacular wonder she is, gate kept only by her boring diurnal parents and a few wooden crib bars. 

At 2:30 am F screams for coconut water, her one true source of solace, and when none of her sleeping family responds, she screams louder. For now, it’s only sleep, but all the same, it’s painful to watch your child do something that hurts herself, that will contribute to a more difficult tomorrow. At 3:30 am, she demands a new diaper, then a story, then a song. I give in to the diaper, but not the story, and pause at the request for a song. It’s 4:00 am; I have to be up in two hours. 

Twinkle song, F pleads, her eyes bleary. Her perfect mouth is a perfect rainbow, quivering slightly, worn from midnight chanting. I know she hopes for acquiesce: a soft win, just something to get her through this endless night. She is tired of being awake for so long, of being alone for so long. 

Not having slept well for nearly five years now, I am also tired of being awake—but F’s sweetness is too sweet, her longing too clarified, her needs far more reasonable than my own. I hold her in my arms and begin singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Her small body rests against mine. I’m fully here, in this moment. Next week, F will turn two; I don’t have many more years of this ahead. 

Halfway through the song, F straightens up. She looks me in the eye. With all the solemnity of a funeral attendee, she raises two hands to cover my mouth and says: Stop. The End. Then she climbs into her crib without looking at me, and closes her eyes. 

TUESDAY

The cover of Bystander, a comics anthology edited by Kadak Collective

I am slowly making my way through Bystander, a comics anthology edited by Kadak Collective, a group of South Asian womxn, non-binary and queer folk who believe making art is “inherently political and can be an intentional, radical act of communication and change.” 

I’m unsurprised in reading so many personal stories that are byproducts of sweeping political and social narratives—stories that were incubated inside a society that forgets community in favor of oneself. The actions of any bystander—one who observes but does not participate, will always transgress the walls of an individual life and seep into the fabric of our larger societies and worlds, whether or not one intends for it to. Every action has a consequence; every inaction does, too. 

WEDNESDAY

I am pleased to share that my 2026 calendars with Amber Lotus Publishing are now available for pre-order! 

Start Where You Are 2026 weekly planner

You Are Made of Stars 2026 wall calendar

Pre-orders do make a huge difference for artists. Now, especially, it will help my publisher give me the opportunity to create calendars for the 2027 year, too. 

Start Where You Are 2026 weekly planner: Available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

You Are Made of Stars 2026 wall calendar: Available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

If you’re planning on grabbing a few for yourself or a friend, please do! I am, as always, grateful.

THURSDAY

What if every subway stop was named after a woman? the latest project by Rebecca Solnit; America’s brightest minds will walk away by Neel Patel. 

I read Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, which felt far too gratuitous for me to maintain interest in—but I did finish it. 

I finished The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah, which I enjoyed, mostly, for the introduction to rural Alaskan living, but it didn’t choke me the way Hannah’s work usually does. 

I’m beginning Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin and drawing my way through Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India by Rakesh Khanna and J. Furcifer Bhairav. 

FRIDAY

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That’s all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts. 

—Field Guide by Tony Hoagland

See you next week!

xx,

M


To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

In Sketchbook, Process Tags Parenting, Parenthood, Kadak Collective, Comics, Amber Lotus Publishing, Calendar, Planner, Start Where You Are, You Are Made of Stars, Rebecca Solnit, Neel Patel, Jen Beagin, Kristin Hannah, Lauren Elkin, \, Rakesh Khanna, J. Furcifer Bhairav, Tony Hoagland
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Dear Somebody: Making new paths.

January 26, 2024

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 062fcdc9-68b0-43ce-9397-6abd2bbfd161_2283x3068.jpg
View fullsize 3464d989-2d05-4922-ba22-cf246ec353c6_2282x3057.jpg

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


To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

In Life Tags Motherhood, Parenting, Parenthood, Creative Pep Talk, Andy J. Pizza, Graduate School, Start Where You Are, Journal, Books, John Steinbeck, Love, The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac, Mary Oliver
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Dear Somebody: The start of something.

January 5, 2024

Happy new year, everyone. 

I took the last few weeks off in an effort to not be on the computer or my phone and it was wonderful, though I missed writing. This week’s letter is a mush of end-of-year recap, more/less for the new year, and, of course, poetry. 


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

MONDAY 

End-of-year lists are tough for me, because I tend to zoom in on what doesn’t work instead of celebrating all that does. This used to be motivating. Recently, I’ve realized how continuing to push myself without acknowledging how far I’ve come has taken a toll on my confidence, resilience, and motivation. 

I don’t want the rest of my years to continue this way. Luckily, I am reminded daily that nothing in life has to be this or that. I can celebrate some things and decide to do other things differently. I can feel gratitude for what I have and let go of what I don’t need or want. I can love well and uphold strict boundaries. 

The gray is where clarity lives. It is simple. It is both. 

My 2023 memorables: 

  • Having a safe delivery and giving birth to beautiful, healthy F. She is the greatest of all gremlins, the loudest 13-pounder, the absolute apple of both my eyes, and N’s favorite lovey. I can’t wait until she can look me in the face with her gigantic moonbow eyes and say, quite clearly, “no”—just like her sister does. 

  • Graduating from Washington University with my MFA and a permission to dream bigger.

  • Working less. Letting social media fall away. Creating less content, less paid work, less of everything. 

  • Publishing How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Purpose, Clarity, and Heart, a book that was born in the pandemic and carried me through the past few years. 

  • Publishing Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence, the fourth in my journal series. Remembering Start Where You Are, which began it all. Feeling grateful for my past self, who took a chance on herself. Feeling grateful for my present self, who continues to.

  • Some of the best work I made this year was for my column, Being, in Uppercase Magazine. I have the freedom to experiment with full support from my editor, Janine, and I feel lucky and grateful for her trust. 

  • Pushing past the overwhelm to travel with two small children: 

    • Visiting friends and family in New Jersey. Playgrounds. Laundry. Meal prep. Doing the same mundane stuff I do at home, but with my sister. Three o’clock drinks, hide and seek, splash pads. Watching five tiny people I love so much love on each other. 

    • Visiting friends and family in London. Meeting my Penguin UK family. Seeing the city through N’s eyes from the very top of a double-decker bus. Holiday lights. N’s first ice cream crone. F’s first croup. Making it through. 

    • Spending our very first cousins Christmas at my sister’s. The joy of five little adventurers. All-floor hide and seek. Evergreens. Cold walks. A warm and cozy home, supported by a inexhaustible thermostat and family who knows me well. 

    • Visiting upstate New York for the final few days of 2023. Managing expectations. Practicing flexibility. Looking for the helpers; finding them inside ourselves. Creating new traditions that will carry into each next year. 

  • Joining Margaux Kent a poem-a-day project, which has been a lesson in friendship, grace, and the power of art that isn’t shared publicly. 
    *I wrote more about this project in my last letter.

  • Writing this newsletter! This year, propelled by an apathy towards my work, I shifted my focus away from marketing and towards meaning. I write this newsletter for myself, first—and second, in the hopes that it will resonate with someone out in the world. Most of the time, I find that it does. If I’m honest with myself, I can also be honest with you. 

    I wanted to write Dear Somebody weekly, and I tried my best to. Instead, I wrote 32 letters and gave myself a break when I needed one. That feels just right. I feel proud of how much I wrote and I’m excited to write more this year. Both/And. 

TUESDAY

Now that she’s 3, N has taken on an interest in Santa. I myself don’t know how to explain the phenomena of Santa, though my childhood was also made up of The Nutcracker and Christmas trees, dreaming in the same red-and-white-and-sugarplum colors that my children do. 

I don’t feel particularly attached to the idea of Santa, but I recognize what he can bring: Joy. Innocence. The ability to believe in something you can’t see, like friendship or courage or sometimes, yourself. The skills necessary to decide, on your own, when something isn’t worth believing in anymore. 

Who is Santa? N asks. You know, I’m not sure, I reply.  Is he kind? she says. Yes, I say. I think so. He tries to make others happy. She thinks this over. I’d like red rain boots from Santa, she says. Well, I tell her: Then you’ve gotta write to him and ask. And so she does.

Her very first letter to Santa reads: 

Dear Santa,

I want to see you because I really want to see Santa. I want you to take a photo by the Christmas tree so I can see you. And I would still like my red rain boots please. 

Your friend,
N

N places her letter to Santa on the coffee table, next to all of the other letters her cousins wrote to him. She studies the table, laden with cookies and milk and carrots for the reindeer. She looks at the chimney, which definitely doesn’t have room for even the slimmest of Santa’s to shimmy through. She wonders if she’ll hear him. She wonders if the reindeer will wait for him to return. 

I hope these letters will keep him warm, she says, at long last, before climbing up the stairs to say goodnight. 

WEDNESDAY

“Racism, it seems to me, is usually not calculated but is rather a form of stupidity: it’s the absence of thought. That’s why it is very important to think and speak as clearly as we can.

Of course I do also believe in the political value of slow forms, of art-making, even if this value is quite intangible and unpredictable, and even if I fairly regularly experience crises of faith. People with different professions and temperaments might be more suited to quick action; the present extremity of violence will eventually crest (even though this is actually very difficult to think about right now) and the tempo will shift and the slow people will become useful again. And at the same time there are shorter-term things we can all do, like speak truth to power when power is lying. We can try to lift up the voices that are being suppressed or drowned out. We can insist on history, and on facts, and on humanism.

But, also, artists and intellectuals are just people of the world. We need to hold on to the very basic democratic principle that the exercise of individual agency becomes powerful en masse.”

—Isabella Hammad in conversation with Sally Rooney

”
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”

—from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

THURSDAY

After seeing Elizabeth Haidle’s more/less list, I read Anis Mojgani’s and Julia Rothman’s. 

And then I made my own:

Also: more hide and seek, more lemon, more taking new paths. 

FRIDAY

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—”i am running into a new year” by Lucille Clifton


In 2024, I wish us all health, happiness, and hope. Thanks for being here with me. It will forever mean the world to me. —M


xx,

M


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In Life Tags New Year, End of Year, Lists, Memories, Recap, Motherhood, Parenting, Parenthood, Graduate School, How it Feels to Find Yourself, Go Your Own Way, Start Where You Are, Uppercase Magazine, Family, Friends, Poetry, Santa, Isabella Hammad, Sally Rooney, Racism, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, Elizabeth Haidle, more/less list, Julia Rothman, Anis Mojgani, i am running into a new year, Lucille Clifton
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Meera Lee Patel is an artist, writer, and book maker. Her books have sold over one million copies, and been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide.

Her newsletter, Dear Somebody, is a short weekly note chronicling five things worth remembering, including a look into her process, reflections on motherhood, and creative inspiration.

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