Dear Somebody: Confronting your inner critic.

From The Worst Boss I've Ever Had, a comic about confronting your inner critic.

Hello, everyone! I know it's been awhile. I'm navigating some unexpected personal news and health changes, but things are finally beginning to finally shift to a manageable place. Though it's freezing here in St. Louis, I'm enjoying the seasons' transition; I hope brisk air is sweeping you into its arms wherever you are. 

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

MONDAY

I don't often feel like a mother. Two years into being one, the title continues to feel like a pair of too-big shoes I'm eagerly waiting to grow into. What does a mother feel like? I have my suspicions, certainly. A mother is calm. A mother is well-assembled. Someone that knows what to do. Someone who has answers, and a medicine cabinet full of tried-and-true remedies. A mother knows their way around the kitchen, and a new city, and the inner workings of their own mind. A mother is someone who knows. Someone whose heart has been split open, as I hear so often, by their child––a heart that's now grown so large there's barely enough space for it left in their chest. Is this me? I don't know. My heart seems well-adjusted to its cavity. 

N wakes up sobbing lately. Her cries are like a siren; she sits up and wails with such alarm that I wonder what terrors visited her young mind. When the crying doesn't stop, I go in and pick her up. We move to the light that slips in between the closed blinds. I sing Carole King until she says Mama, no, putting her hand to my mouth. We sit in the big chair, her face buried in my chest, my cheek resting on her head. Already she's so tall, legs like a ballerina jutting out from my either side. Her breath becomes deeper, steady. She is asleep and my arms are full of her. She is asleep and I feel strangely settled. She is asleep and I am someone who knows how to soothe. For her, I figured out how. My medicine cabinet is empty, but my heart is full. I am a mother––this I have known, but for these few minutes, I begin to believe it, too.

TUESDAY

For the WORK issue of The Nib, I made a comic about the worst boss I've ever worked for: myself. You can read the comic here on my blog and order a print issue of the The Nib – please help support this wonderful indie publication!

My 2023 calendar and planners are also now available, through Buyoly and Amber Lotus Publishing. These are excellent gifts for the upcoming season, and a great way to encourage my little business.

*Support more BIPOC makers this year! I love these hand-poured candles by Golden Hour Co. in rainier and oakmoss. 

WEDNESDAY

“You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget. You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise.” 

––Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

THURSDAY

All through autumn I wish for my body to become something new. I want my body to be stronger, less sensitive to these invisible, internal changes. I want it to be stoic, indifferent to the weight of its responsibility. I want it to perform flawlessly. I disregard the fact that it completes thousands of tasks to keep my heart beating and lungs full of air, without my knowing when or how. I am grateful, I think, but I ask it for more. I want my body to be decent. I want it to look beautiful though I know it is doing too much. It is tired and needs rest, but there are books to write and school to attend and so many to care for. 

For months, I offer my body no grace. I shroud it in resentment. I criticize it and wonder why that doesn't amount to change. Why it won't simply be better, the way I imagine other people's bodies to be. I speak to it like I would never speak to another; I allow my imagination to make me even more cruel. After months of sickness, when I finally come to my senses, when I remember how love actually works, it strikes me that I have never taken my body into both arms, never voiced the words buried beneath my anger: Yes, it is you. It is you that I choose over and over again.

FRIDAY

she told me then
that they
"the slaves who were ourselves"
searched for one another
tried to get back
to places they had been before
to them that they had known
needed and loved
to them that knew

she told me then
that this searching
was hard journeying
harder even than
moving over water
than finding strange language
and people with nothing under their skin
hard journeying she told me
this way back to ourselves

––exiles return by bell hooks

xo,

M

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Dear Somebody: Together at last.

From Three Shooting Stars, a tiny comic about the life of an artist. 

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

MONDAY

When we board the plane to New Jersey, a switch goes off. I don't know where the switch was, or is, but it must exist because something flips it from ON to OFF. 

I refer to it as The Sea Switch. This switch controls the space between me and N, a swath of distance that rose between us when I crossed the Atlantic for France back in June, and has remained between us for the 8 weeks since. This sea is full of rocky waves. Thrashing storms. A constant swallowing of debris.

When the plane begins taxiing, N‘s eyes open wide. She immediately shuts the window shade and crawls into my lap. I’m wedged into the middle seat, a sleeping stranger to my right, T to my left. N takes my hand in hers and burrows her face into my neck. I’m surprised by the intimacy in her actions: something so traditionally mother-and-child, that for us, has become foreign. Forgotten. I’m so pleased that I ask T to take pictures of us, and he does. 

When I send the photos to my sister later that evening, she tells me I’m beaming, the light shooting out of my face. I study the photos and it’s true: mother and child, in each other’s arms, together at last—even, if only, for a little while.

TUESDAY

"A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” 

––Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

WEDNESDAY

For those wondering if art school is necessary, I enjoyed this series of interviews:

“I think college is important if you want to learn specific skills. But later I prioritized making art — I didn’t go into an M.F.A. program after I got my bachelor’s degree, because I really wanted to think about what I was doing. That’s when I made a U-turn — I stopped taking assignments, decided to make use of what I had learned, went home to Jamaica for a while and began making work about the Caribbean, a marginalized place, but a place of opportunity nonetheless. And that’s what a lot of my work still deals with: Caribbean ecosystems, their issues, what’s beautiful. School taught me to write down my dreams and attack them, that they turn to dust if you don’t.” ––Paul Anthony Smith, from Art School Confidential by Noor Brara

THURSDAY

A simple ink-on-bristol comic titled Three Shooting Stars: Chronicling the Life of an Artist, now up on my blog.

FRIDAY

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

––The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

xo,

M

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