“Some people think I do ‘a lot of different things’ but I think that I am doing only one thing several different ways: I support folks, in groups, workshops, and individually, as they figure out what is theirs to do, and what is not, and how we can aim our labors and our gifts toward negotiating the peripeteia, the turning point that is upon us. We are living through a transformative and dangerous era. I see my work as trying to marshal courage, compassion and collective resources to alleviate inevitable suffering – and in my most idealistic moments, I can imagine we are seeding a new world.” — Martha Crawford
The first line of this paragraph really hit me in the solar plexus when I read it. I still don’t feel the urge to post things on Bluesky, but when I do stick my head in there every so often after following a link, I tend to see posts by Kate Schapira. Her work with the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth has been inspiring to me since I interviewed her way back in 2016 for my comic on sail cargo. She mentioned having learned some valuable skills in one of Martha’s cohorts, and after clicking through to Martha’s website I can see that they’re clearly singing from the same hymnal. It’s nice when people I admire are connected to other people who clearly get it.
Looking forward to digging through her offerings in the weeks to come (including this workshop called GROUP GROUP!!).
My friend Christopher made himself an acronym to live by (PAASH: P.E., Art, Admin, Study, Help) and I liked the idea so much I had to make my own. The general idea, as far as he described it, was to capture the things he does in any given day or week that make him feel like a whole person. If something feels off, he can take a look at the acronym and see what’s missing.
After a lot of messy note taking and backronymification I landed on CLEAR: Create, Learn, Embody, Act Up, Rest.
Create: make something with your hands, has to be tangible, no computer shit
Learn: engage the conspiracy string brain, read a book with a pencil in hand, take a class, listen to a podcast
Embody: move in any capacity, whether concerted exercise or rolling around on the floor like a pill bug
Act Up: engage in some form of activism, ideally connected to community, that pushes you outside your comfort zone
Rest: the hard one, zero input time, staring into space, lying on the ground, generally after lunch
They’re not so different, really, but I think it does add something to have to come up with your own. I’d be very curious to see other people’s down the line. Maybe we all, deep down, want the same five things out of a day. (There’s a thought: should it be limited to five letters? That’s just how these two examples shook out, but I see no reason to limit the parameters.)
There’s something undeniably different about finding a community via blogs.
Social media spoiled us for feeling like we were all in the same giant room—liking, replying, reblogging, DMing and so on—but when I go to quote a friend or draw attention to a project on my own site, I find myself applying a higher standard of stewardship. How do I want to introduce other people to this person? What work of theirs really sings to me? I always try to do my due diligence with tags and links and properly formatted images, because we’re making our own internet out here and we owe it to each other to get it right.
I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram. There are also fewer people to keep up with overall. I’m more likely to unfollow feeds whose updates I don’t leap at the chance to consume. I’m more aware of nuanced opinions, annual projects, and the inner thoughts of relative strangers.
Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching. I’m far more likely to write or make things just to please myself on my site. I’m also always genuinely delighted and startled when someone tells me they’ve read a post.
I don’t want to lose that feeling of noodling around in the dark.
After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.
I really like this post from my pal Christopher about his approach to “super-saturation and world-building” in his paintings without the use of psychedelics (despite what many people seem to think upon viewing them).
Add cardboard (carbon), gently torn, to some dried leaves (carbon), and the leftover zucchini bits and broccoli floret (nitrogen) from dinner, and you’ll end up with a singularly useful and generative substance (“soil”), from which all other life now stems. Is that not amazing? And it’s available to you. The earth’s deepest and most primal incantation.
I lost track of Cassie for a year or two but I’m now I’m subscribed to her newsletter about compost and it’s great.
Working on the music, for me, it’s kind of important to not fake it in some ways, to not try to force this emotional state out of it, to sort of pay attention to what’s going on in your life, if you’re feeling inspired or motivated just letting it happen. […] Especially after you’ve released a bunch of records for a long time, you don’t want to manufacture longing.
I signed up for another one of Jocelyn’s online classes last month, and so far I’ve found it incredibly helpful in finding my way back to bits of myself and my creative practice that have been occluded by caregiving. One of the exercises was a mind map exploring all the tools we use to access and interact with our creative selves. The four stages she suggests are Ritual, Connection, Collection, and Synthesis. Here’s a big mess of ideas around those hubs:
I love letting myself use little doodles to explore concepts like this. I think it started after Shay Mirk shared some More/Less lists they’d made for the year and inspired me to make my own. (Pretty sure I did one for 2022 as well but I can’t find it so here’s an old one.)
I see these inventories and remember that I have such a robust series of practices for doing what I do. I also see how the things I’m pursuing in my life right now have roots in this list from two years ago, which I love. It all takes such a long time.
I recorded a Ramble about all this the other night that I still haven’t edited and uploaded to Patreon, but it’s coming. Still circling the question of my job and what I think it is vs. what it actually is.
I’m washing my eyes with words and hoping something turns up that works as I’m moving forward.
Robert Eggers, on writing dialect for The Lighthouse
7. People pretend there are readers and non-readers. But there are just people willing to practice the patience necessary to get hypnotized, and those who quit before their eyes turn into spirals. To read is to welcome this hypnosis, await its arrival, then trust its direction.
I wish I’d known at twenty-one, when I developed a chronic illness and became suddenly alienated from all my peers, that over the decades, one by one, all of them would come join me on my island.
Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
I come back to this quote a lot these days, thinking about it from the perspective of losing a loved one early in life, or becoming a caregiver, or any of the other life circumstances that hit us before we feel they “should.” It’s a weird construct, when you get right down to it. These things happen all the time, so what undergirds the idea that they’re aberrant?
I’m much further into reading Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise than I was a couple months ago. (Funny how I can’t crack into a book that gets too directly at my current lived experience while I’m right up close to it. I had to go to another state before I could find a way in. I’m hooked now, though.) As far as he’s concerned the undergirding is a sense of entitlement; this particularly North American obsession with individuality and control and comfort.
The book’s full of things I feel like I’ll need a long, long time to process.
Exactly one year before I started drafting this post (which then languished for a little while, so technically now it’s more than a year ago, but whatever you get the idea) I wrote a short thread on Twitter about feelings and impermanence. I dug it up because I came across this photo and couldn’t remember what the hell I was doing that led me to group these little slips of paper in this kind of configuration. I’ve copied the thread verbatim below.
“Did an exercise in therapy this morning where my therapist asked me to list all the feelings running through my brain/body on bits of paper. Spent the rest of the session sorting them into affinity stacks while we talked.
It got me thinking about Chronic Feelings vs. Current Feelings. These are current, influenced by the hospital visit this week, the slow return to stability after a trauma, my anxiety about understanding my family’s finances, an impending trip, a disappointing career decision.
The Chronic Feelings are things like anticipatory grief, professional burnout, climate anxiety, hatred of capitalism, Pandemic Fatigue. The stuff we’re all collectively steeping in that constitutes a full emotional plate on its own.
But to try and be present with the feelings in my body right NOW requires a different sort of lens. It requires understanding that all of this passes.
I get reliably down most afternoons. Eating lunch triggers a slump of despair and exhaustion that isn’t the end of the world. It’s rare that I feel dreadful while I’m having my tea and scrawling pages into my journal outside in the sun first thing in the morning, so whatever’s coming for me today will, at the very least, abate for a half hour tomorrow. This helps to remember.
I have many weird/bad feelings about Twitter but also I think a lot about the people I know on here who’ve been generous enough to share their complex emotional stuff over the years. Folks grieving in public, folks naming anxiety, folks sharing their affirmations. It’s important.
A big cornerstone of how I’ve carried myself online for years has been an emphasis on sharing clear, proactive, hopeful things. Sometimes I fear this season of my life is going to break that, because it’s HARD. But I do think there are still ways to approach it with that ethic.”
Weird to still be chewing on the same stuff a year later. Weird to still be in an endless rollercoaster of absurdity and grief with my dad. Weird, also, to see the cadence of tweeting transposed onto my blog. Writing like that doesn’t belong here! But also I engaged in it for so many years on that platform. Every container nurtures its own syntax.
A friend asked if I’d signed up for Bluesky and the wave of exhaustion I felt in response washed the flesh clean off my bones. It’s not just that Twitter seems to be continually on fire these days, it’s the broader truth that social media feels hollow to me now. The ADS! There are so many ads. Why did I ever put up with a space that was so aggressively trying to sell me things at every turn? (The answer is that it was giving me the Good Brain Chemicals when I interacted with people I care about, but these days I don’t post enough to get notifications, so I’m trading my attention for NOTHING! No wonder the shine has worn off.)
I’ve been thinking about this installment of Holly Whitaker’s newsletter ever since I read it a couple weeks ago. I haven’t even dug into the links, but the dislocation theory of addiction latched onto my brain stem and has yet to let go.
Our modern social arrangement, Alexander argues, means that we have to sacrifice “family, friends, meaning, and values” in order to be more “efficient” and “competitive” in the rat race. In this framework, addictive behaviors are adaptive responses meant to fill that void of meaning and purpose. Using substances can provide a temporary sense of community (with other users), purpose (to acquire the substance), and meaning (feelings of euphoria or calm from using the substance). Substance abuse and addiction help to fill the gaps in meaning and purpose left by modern society.
None of this is news to me, really, but the articulation slotted something into focus. Reflecting on consumerism as an addiction (or maybe….everything as an addiction?) this month has been a valuable touch point.
And then here I am hitting go on a reprint of my graphic novel! A product I must then sell! A product I might even sell on the premise that it will make people feel less alone! HNGNNNGNNHHGHHH.
(I was going to expand on stuff in that tweet thread in this post too, but I got sidetracked and now it’s time to make my dad his breakfast so I’m hitting post because there are no ads here and nobody needs to buy anything and it’s one of those days where I want to move to the woods and eat grubs for the rest of my life so byeeeeee)
