Dear Somebody: N turns five years old.

N is five (mixed media, 2025)

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

MONDAY 

When N wakes up on her fifth birthday, the morning is ready. The sparkly lights have been hung, dangling over the bannister. The pom poms have been hung, twirled around the sparkly lights and the felted banner that reads happy birthday. The gifts are piled on top of the squishy yellow chair, waiting to be opened. The flamingo cake is baked and assembled, waiting to be eaten. The birthday breakfast is cooked and plated, a tiny candle on top, waiting to be blown out.

When N wakes up on her fifth birthday, her sister is ready. F follows her around with arms outstretched, longing to place them around her big sister. Happy birthday, N. Birthday huggie time! she screams over and over again, in the only pitch volume she knows: loud. F follows N from room to room, struggling to hug her while N struggles to walk away, struggling to hug her while N brushes her teeth. That’s enough hugs! N says, annoyed, and F, finally giving up, turns to me and says: I want my birthday to come out now.

When N wakes up on her fifth birthday, her father and I are ready. We’ve been talking about it for days now: how it’s been five years since we first became parents, how five is a milestone, how five means something. I recall every moment in the past five years when I have faltered under the weight of parenthood, and wish I’d been more present for the sweet child in front of me. I remind myself that all I can do is offer N who I am; give her the space necessary to dissent, grow, and learn; and to try—genuinely try, to live a little more graciously. A little more in the present. 

When N climbs into bed on the night of her fifth birthday, her bedroom is ready. The ceiling fan whirls. Her sparkly canopy gently sways. The stars on her walls twinkle and swirl. When I tuck her in, she asks me to stay and snuggles into me. She clutches my body like a toddler during drop off, so closely that I forget she’s five years old. So closely that I forget that next year she’ll be six, then twelve, and then out of my arms altogether. N is quiet. Her eyes are closed, but I know she’s awake because her hand moves so closely in mine. Quite suddenly, I don’t feel ready anymore. 

TUESDAY

N’s flamingo cake, on her fifth birthday (2025)

N requests a flamingo cake for her birthday and although I fret about it for weeks, it comes together quite nicely and with little difficulty. Five years into making birthday cakes for my kids, I feel something I rarely feel, which is pride: for taking on a task and accomplishing it, for making a young kid’s wish come true, for enjoying the process and letting the mistakes show. 

N eats a flamingo on her fifth birthday (2025)

Past cakes include F’s bluey cake, F’s rainbow cake, N’s rainbow cake, N’s painted cake.

WEDNESDAY

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” ―Ursula K. Le Guin

THURSDAY

To celebrate the publication of my journal, Learn to Let Go, I invited a few people I admire to share what they’re letting go of, and what they’re learning in the process. 

Today, I’m featuring New York Times Bestselling Author, wellness educator, and Restorative Writing teacher Alex Elle. Alex is also the author of How We Heal, a practical and empowering guide to self-healing. 

I’ve known Alex since my Brooklyn days, and it’s been stunning to see her growth over the years—as an author and artist, but also as a mother, partner, and friend. I’m so happy to share this space with her today. 

What have you let go of?

AE: I’ve let go of the belief that I have to prove my worth through overextending myself—creatively or personally. I no longer chase validation by saying yes when I mean no, or by holding onto relationships and projects that no longer align. Letting go of people-pleasing and performance has made space for deeper honesty, more intentional work, and a steadier connection to my own voice. What’s mine won’t require me to betray myself to keep it.

What did you gain when you released it?

AE: I gained a grounded sense of self-trust and the freedom to create, connect, and care from a place of alignment—not obligation.

What are you letting go of?

AE: I’m learning to let go of urgency—the need to have all the answers, fix what’s broken, or rush my healing..

What are you learning from this process?

AE: I’m learning that the more I unfurl, the more I bloom.

Many thanks to Alex for sharing a little bit of her journey with us. You can learn more about Alex’s work and subscribe to her newsletter, Gratitude Journal. 

P.S. Past interviews include Carolyn Yoo on letting go of artistic identity, and Malaka Gharib, on letting go of yes.

Learn to Let Go came out last week! Thank you to everyone who has bought, shared, and celebrated the release of this special book. 

In case you missed it, I spoke about acceptance, letting go, and making books with Radim Malinic on the Daring Creativity podcast. I joined my friend Kena Paranjape for a really lovely conversation about the book in the Supernova community. The book is featured in the latest issue of Uppercase Magazine (thank you, Janine!), and I joined Jessica Swift for a conversation about letting go in our creative practices at her Art Oasis retreat.

As a reminder, Bookshop.org is offering a 15% on all orders with the code LTLG15 for a limited time. This is a good time to grab a copy or two or five, especially for upcoming holiday gifts. You can also purchase from another shop listed here, or if you’re overseas, the UK edition. Thank you, always, for supporting my work. 

FRIDAY

On the bridge
A village witch
Tells me

You see nothing
Clearly, since in all your eyes
A fog gathers generations

—The Witch by Ye Hui

See you next week!

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Being here.

An illustration for my column, Being, in Issue #61 of Uppercase Magazine

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

MONDAY 

When T pulls handfuls of weeds away from our hydrangea bushes, we discover a mourning dove sitting quietly, her back against the brick of our house. T stops pulling weeds; N stops eating; I stop talking. Is she nesting? Is she hurt? How can we help? We didn’t mean to expose her, but we have. We go inside. From the window I watch her two small eyes blinking in the sun. 

When F contracts an illness, I know the week ahead will be gutted, and it is. The sitter is canceled, my work is placed on hold indefinitely. The deadlines pile up, as does the laundry, the dust. My inbox groans; my daily poem practice falls further behind.

I don’t optimize. It doesn’t make sense anymore. In the past, I have worried, having convinced myself that worrying is doing something and therefore, at least, still productive. Of course, I was wrong; each day, I continue to be. If there’s a purpose to life, maybe this is it—to constantly unlearn until, at the end, I am stripped of all belief, leaving the way I came in: honest, unharmed, full of possibility. 

I don’t optimize. I have worked too hard at letting go. There are no to-do lists in my head. I don’t write poems while F takes her bottle, I don’t clean the house while she eats oatmeal. I spend time leisurely, as if I have boatloads of it, as if someone out there is making more of it for me. We sit outside and listen to the world. I ask F if she remembers the eclipse and the way the sky moved like a movie. She wails in response. She cries a lot. She coughs a lot. I sit with her and together, we do nothing. I am here. 

More than once, she crawls into my lap, buries her face in my shirt, and falls asleep. I wish I had my phone, I think to myself, so I could do something. Old habits die hard, but I recognize the impulse, however warily. I don’t retrieve my phone. Instead, I do what I am doing: I sit on the second-floor landing and rub F’s back with my hands, staring at our hallway walls. I am here. 

I rock F to sleep, something I haven’t done for the past 8 months, and in this act, she feels like a baby in my arms once more. I admit, I am nostalgic. Maybe it’s because she’s turning one next week, maybe it’s because I am turning decades older than that. Maybe it’s because there is no match for a moment sweeter than this one, where a child sleeps safely in my arms. Maybe it’s because there’s safety in these moments for me, too. I am here. From above I watch her two small eyes blinking with sleep.

TUESDAY

I read Go to Sleep (I Miss You) and Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley; I read Tokyo These Days by Taiyo Matsumoto (that cover!); I started Sunny by Jason Reynolds. I am re-reading James Marshall’s eulogy for Arnold Lobel, one of my favorite children’s writers and illustrators, and a fellow devotee of friendship. 

WEDNESDAY

For my latest Being column in Issue #61 of Uppercase Magazine, I wrote about how the themes in our creative work change shape and expand, evolving as we do, but ultimately remain the same—they are fragments of our foundational selves that we will always explore. 

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I touch on the importance of revisiting past work, even if it’s difficult to do so: 

“Revisiting old work is clarifying. It brings you closer to the person you were at that time—the person who felt pulled to capture a feeling, thought, or question through their art. It’s also a chance to notice how much you and your work have changed—a chance to acknowledge the creative obstacles you’ve puzzled through and the personal ones your artmaking pulled you through.”

—from The First Work I Make is the Last Work I Make for Uppercase Magazine #61, available now. 

THURSDAY

Today, it was pointed out to me that my emotional vocabulary is pretty limited(!). I was both bowled over and energized by this comment. I’ve spent the past decade helping others identify and process their own emotions, only to quietly realize that my knowledge has plateaued. I am humbled and, quite honestly, enthused by how far there is to go.

I am reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett in an immediate effort to remedy my own cause. I welcome further reading! If you have a book recommendation, please do share.

FRIDAY

Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves.

—from Leaves by Ursula K. Le Guin

xx,
M

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Dear Somebody: Inyeon.

An illustration from my latest Being column for Uppercase Magazine

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

MONDAY 

“Drawing—or mark making—has been a space for me to explore concepts without committing—before language, there were images,” writes Caitlin. After a few months without drawing, I feel bewildered, unsure of how to begin. I decide to start small to avoid overwhelm, choosing a pencil and a post-it note as my tools. I draw a small line and then another. As I layer them on top of each other, I realize I am drawing my infant daughter in stitches, the way a needle does with thread. This is the first spark—a signal that I’m on the right path. The tangible act of mark-making unlocks inspiration the same way somatic movement unravels anxiety: you must do to change how you feel. I decide to make an embroidered painting—a long-term project I’ll work on throughout my year-long maternity leave, to aid me in processing this season I’m in.

I choose it deliberately for the tedious, meditative nature of the work involved, and for its tactility. I need to feel the thread and needle; the drape of the linen as it pours over my knees. I need to feel the rhythm of my days without letting the movements mindlessly wash through me. I need to feel the frustration and monotony—and the sweetness and joy, without minimizing the weight and value of either.”

—Excerpted from A Season for Stitching, my latest Being column for Issue 59 of Uppercase Magazine

TUESDAY

“Wholeness isn’t something we acquire by stacking achievements or checking boxes or acquiring products or consumer goods. And I worry about this because I have two small children myself. They are five and six, and I’m thinking often about the world that they’re growing up in and what is that world telling them about who they should be and what success is. And what I worry about is that right now the world tells our kids and all of us that to be successful, you need one of three things: to be powerful, to be famous, or to be rich. But we all know people who have all three of those — who are wealthy, powerful, and famous — and profoundly unhappy, who don’t feel whole. 

I think to truly feel whole — it’s not about acquiring something that we don’t have. It’s about remembering who we fundamentally are. Part of healing, to me, is about recognizing what we already have inside of us, coming to trust that, coming to rely on that, and ultimately coming to find fulfillment in who we are.”

—Vivek Murthy, in conversation with On Being’s Krista Tippet

WEDNESDAY

What I’ve been reading lately:

Matrescence by Lucy Jones, a beautiful part-science/part-memoir investigation into what happens to a person—spiritually, physically, mentally—during the process of becoming a mother. 

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, which I looked forward to reading each night for reasons I still can’t quite pinpoint. It’s an agonizingly accurate capture of high school anxiety and adolescence through the eyes of Lee Fiora, a protagonist I cannot stand and also identify with entirely too much. 

A Frog in the Fall by Swedish illustrator Linnea Sterte, who has absolutely caught me with her line work and color sensibility. This gorgeous 300+ page comic is about a frog who “experiences everything for the first time”—full of humor and sweetness, totally mysterious. 

THURSDAY

We watch Past Lives and I learn about the Buddhist philosophy of inyeon, which serves as an explanation for why certain people connect and reconnect in certain times and places over the course of their lives. If two people have inyeon, they will find each other over and over again, in the tiniest of exchanges—crossing next to each other on the street, their sleeves brush as they board the train, one hands the other their change, the other is a postman and delivers their mail—the tiniest of exchanges, yes, except they’re all adding up, they’re compounding, over and over again, throughout 8,000 lifetimes—until their fates eventually collide.

FRIDAY

I sit here perpetually inventing new people
as if the population boom were not enough
and not enough terror and problems
God knows, but I know too,
that’s the point. Never fear enough
to match delight, nor a deep enough abyss,
nor time enough, and there are always a few
stars missing.
I don’t want a new heaven and new earth,
only the old ones.
Old sky, old dirt, new grass.
Nor life beyond the grave,
God help me, or I’ll help myself
by living all these lives
nine at once or ninety
so that death finds me at all times
and on all sides exposed,
unfortressed, undefended,
inviolable, vulnerable, alive.

—Ars Lunga by Ursula K. Le Guin

xx,

M

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