“When You Can Tell Your Story And It Doesn’t Make You Cry, That’s When You Know You’ve Healed.”

“Be patient when things are not going right. Accept that what is yours will come to you in the right way at just the right moment.”

— Unknown

My latest Guardian Books cartoon.

“I like Simone Weil’s idea that writing is actually the translation of a text we already carry within us. That notion makes a heavy task lighter. In fact, though, writing is the backbreaking work of hacking a footpath, as in a coal mine; in total darkness, beneath the earth. In poetry there are moments of illumination. A streak of light falls in the dark corridor, then the darkness slams shut overhead once more. In prose the darknesses are even thicker, the black clods even harder.”

— Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook”

“She remembered who she was and the game changed.”

— Lalah Deliah

Okay so when I got sucked into the phantom zone last week while watching youtube shorts a lot of the content it fed me was ADHD tips and a lot of it was either useless for me or redundant but there was one REALLY good tip about taking breaks that wasn't about taking breaks it was about RETURNING from breaks and the tip is: when you are about to go on a break, before you step away from your task (work, craft project, school stuff) decide what you'll do as the first thing when you sit back down at your task and set up your workspace to do that thing.

That means you've got an easy re-entry point to go back to doing the thing instead of sitting back down and having to make a decision or having to reorient from break mode to task mode. You have pre-reoriented and can just go back into working mode.

I've been doing this by circling what my next task on my tasklist is and bringing up the windows that I'll need for the task before I step away from my desk.

Brilliant hack, works great for me, hope it works great for you as well.

“growth isn’t always constant. relapses happen. it doesn’t erase all your success.”

— Unknown

i think ultimately you do really have to kill that part of your brain that vividly imagines how you would redo parts of your life.

Victorian-Inspired Embroidered Puzzle Purse, 2023 (ink and cotton and silk embroidery on kona cotton)

The puzzle purse is a form of itogami, the origami of folded purses. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the puzzle purse became a popular form for love notes and Valentines because they could hold little trinkets (rings, miniatures, locks of hair) and did not require an envelope to seal. This one is reimagined in cloth: the embroidery is permanent, but the message can be ironed away and rewritten. A love that lasts because it can be changed and be made new.

I know there's a lot of advice for handling things like depression and its so fucking easy for people to say "just do this and you'll feel better!" and I hate that, I fucking despise it, but I'm also gonna throw in my two cents about what is personally helping me get out of bed some days and genuinely, not kill myself.

Its taking care of nature.

Seriously. It sounds stupid and some days it feels stupid, but I put up bird feeders because I live in a semi-rural area where human activity is decimating the local bird population and options for safe feeding. So I put up bird feeders. And now I have like 83 different birds flocking to my garden on the daily and screaming at my window if the feeders are empty. And I've seen generations of baby birds brought to my garden by their parents because this is where the food is.

And I researched what plants and flowers were native to my area and I spent like $5 on a few different seed packets and sprinkled them around the grass and the sad empty flowerbeds and the lawn because the bees have nothing to eat and that's awful and it turns out wildflowers will fucking GROW the moment you look away, but now every spring and summer my lawn is a pretty little multi-colored bug haven.

And I've even gotten the chance to save a few little bug lives because of it. I've taken in cold-shocked bees and given them a warm little tupperware to recover in. I've fed bugs sugar water to get their energy back to take their food home. I've given dying bugs a sheltered, safe place to spend their last moments.

I planted a veggie garden. And I know I'm very lucky in that I have the space to do that, but also, you can grow a lot of things indoors. My friend has literally the smallest apartment you can imagine but she grows chives in her bathroom and grows five radishes at a time in a pot in the kitchen. Literally five. But it makes her so happy every single time she pulls them up or trots off to the bathroom to snip some chives.

I pick trash up every two weeks. The pick stick was like $4 online and I just put the bag out with my bi-weekly trash pick-up and its disgusting but but nobody else is gonna do it and I've only got finite time on this earth. If nobody else is going to pick up that can, I will. Because some innocent wild animal doesn't deserve to get hurt by human ignorance, and I deserve to walk home and see pretty flourishing nature instead of depressing discarded trash like I feel like most days.

I've left water out for the wildlife and watched hedgehogs, local dogs on their walks, squirrels and all sorts stop by to take a drink, because humans are fucking selfish and we're making something as basic as water so hard to access for anyone but ourselves, but I can fix a little bit of that just by putting out a bowl. Sometimes I don't even have to remember to fill it because the rain will fill it for me, and its kind of like nature's way of saying "you're helping me so I'm going to help you out too." Which is neat.

Like most days I do not want to be living on this earth but my god earth did not get a choice about us living here, and we're ruining it, and it actually feels so good to help stop and un-do a little bit of that destruction.

And you don't even have to try everything I do. If the only thing you've got the spoons to do is buy one bird feeder and you only remember to fill it once a month, its still something. That once a month could mean the difference between starvation and a full belly to a bird.

Again, none of this is obligatory and I'm not saying at all this is some magical cure for depression, but personally these things are things which are helping me slowly find things to keep getting out of bed for and things to feel a sense of self worth and satisfaction over. I feel better both in and about myself when I feed the birds, when I see the bugs in the garden, when I pick up the trash.

If its something you haven't considered yet, it might be worth a try.