Would you like to buy this print? Every week, there will be ten prints (and that’s it, forever) available for $8 each (including shipping). Each 5x5” print is numbered and signed. Be sure to choose “WEEKLY PRINTS ONLY” for your shipping option at checkout. Last week’s sold out, so hop on while you can! Here’s that link again.
A note for you, if you’re having a bad day.
Hey There Friend,
As I was trying to decide what to write to you, the word that kept coming up in my mind was “healing.” I used to be skeptical about the whole concept of healing, since so many things in my life never really seemed to heal. (Just one example: I kept twisting my ankle and every time the result was worse, and rather than go to the doctor and deal with it, I wrapped it with increasingly elaborate concoctions of stretchy bandages and complained more hyperbolically about its severity. It never seemed to heal; it was an injury lying dormant and waiting to flare back up again, with the ultimate endeavor of DESTROYING ME. Which I was sure that it would, someday.)
But reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem a year and a half ago changed my mind about healing. Menakem insists that healing emotional trauma is possible. He even goes so far as to write that YOU have the capacity to heal internal trauma that doesn’t even belong to you in the first place. (A lot of that book* is about the concept of inherited trauma — the idea that unhealed trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, helping to explain those moments where you’re like, “Why am I crying in fear while looking at this harmless tortoise?”)
In moments where it feels like you’re standing still, accomplishing nothing, or even moving in a kind of reverse, what if non-intellectual parts of you are hard at work healing? There are all kinds of things you need to heal from. You need to heal from hurtful things other people have said or done to you; from moments of betrayal; from the ways in which you experience unfairness; from unresolved trauma (that may even be ancient); and from physical ailment, too. (Luke thinks that sometimes when you’re grumpy and not wanting to get out of bed, your body has recently fought off an illness, and it WON, so you never even knew you were being THREATENED by the illness, but now your body needs a recuperation period that makes no sense to your rational brain, but is incredibly obvious on a cellular bodily level. There is no science to back this up, but I find this logic to be ironclad.)
When you find yourself frustrated with your own lack of motion, three suggestions:
Notice if you’re trying to move away from your discomfort, by distracting yourself with TV, social media, sugar, alcohol, or a whooooole buncha podcasts. If you are trying to stay distracted, give yourself 20 minutes to just stop.You don’t have to meditate, you don’t have to move around, you don’t have to pick yourself up. Just stop whatever you’re doing and drop into the thing you’re feeling. Let your mind wander wherever it goes. Be still. Move toward your own discomfort. That is absolutely the best way to disarm it.
Say to yourself, “I don’t need to be doing anything right now. Something in my body is doing some healing, and actually, that’s amazing."
Be patient. You’ll be in obvious motion again soon. For right now, you are doing a good enough job.
Love,
Sophie
* It would be wrong to mention this book without also listing its subtitle: “Racialized Trauma and the Pathway To Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.” More than anything, this book is a necessary addition to your antiracism library, and if you don’t have it yet, buy it.
Add this to your to-do list.
This week marks the first week of fall. Do something intentional to thank and release your summer; and something else intentional to welcome the new season.
You need me to be more specific? OK. Write down five things that happened this past summer. They don’t have to be nice or sparkly or dramatic; they should be seasonally specific in some way. Then, write “thank you.” Dig a hole in the ground while it’s still soft enough. Bury your thank you note. Bonus points if you can also bury a flower bulb that won’t grow until spring.
To welcome fall: light a fire. It can be as small a fire as lighting a cinnamon-y candle or letting a match stick burn from tip to tip; or you can light a fire in a fireplace or a fire pit and invite people over to cook something smoky and / or sing songs and / or tell stories while wearing sweaters.
A drawing.
Here are three drawings that I found on my computer randomly, and the story behind each of them.
A few years ago I wrote a list of 100 things that I liked, and occasionally rolled a pair of dice to choose one to draw and write about. I was new to Procreate and the Apple Pencil, and loved to sit for literal hours experimenting with those tools while watching TV. This drawing of chanterelles corresponded with “woodsy mushrooms.” I didn’t like mushrooms at all until I tried chanterelles — they were my gateway mushroom. You don’t know that mushrooms have lots of different flavors or textures until someone helps you to know it, and I have had a lot of mycelium-iacs in my life who have helped me to learn this lesson.
In my 20s, I kept writing things that would get rejected by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. I really had it in my head that if I could get just one thing accepted, my whole life would change and suddenly I’d be a celebrity humorist, which was what I wanted to be. (It is not REALLY a thing.) After my umpteenth rejection, I decided I needed to start my own magazine of humor writing, because I couldn’t figure out where to send my rejects, and I didn’t want them to just pile up indefinitely. I started neutrons / protons, titled after a username I’d seen on LiveJournal in 2001. For years, I worked way too hard on this magazine. It was fun, when other people I admired did it with me. When I moved to Chicago from New Orleans, it stopped being fun. Now it is just a memory. But I used to make a LOT of cat drawings for that magazine. It seems like I was going for a layered music note theme here, although I don’t know what this drawing went with.
Here I am at fourteen with an at-home hair dye look and an acrylics-on-canvas painting of Cat Woman I did for my studio art elective class. The students I currently have in my college classes were not born yet.
What’s on my mind this week.
(This will be about pregnancy. Skip it if you don’t want to read about pregnancy.)
It has become very difficult to pick anything up off the ground. I spent truly six hours organizing my food pantry last Saturday, and it would have taken half as long if there weren’t things in the pantry that are close to the ground. (Food storage organization is the home-care thing in my world about which I care most. Some people need their laundry to be done, or their beds made, or their toilets scrubbed. I have nightmares about my alternative flours going rancid, or discovering moldy leftovers in the cheese drawer. This really does border on obsession, and I have tried to find a childhood reason for my repulsion to over-stuffed fridges or spice racks, but I’m not sure. Do other people have this?) Every time I have to do a ground-related thing, I make a LOT of noise, because I feel victimized by how much trouble it is to get down there, and I want EVERYONE AROUND TO KNOW. Including house flies. I want my cats to know that it hard to pet them. I want radishes to know that it is hard to harvest them. There are five weeks left in this pregnancy, and I have reached the telltale place that all the books talked about where I am incredibly ready to not have to share my body anymore. (I’ve been READY for some time now, but I am currently INCREDIBLY ready. I am not necessarily ready to share my life with a newborn baby, but I am ready for my liver to have more space. Right now, my liver is trying to convince itself that the rent is worth it in a Manhattan-style studio. I want it to move into the four-bedroom Midwestern townhouse it was designed for.)
Notes.
I have to come to terms with the fact that I do not have the audience for an Audience Participation portion of this newsletter. Let me take this moment to personally thank Caroline Wold, who was the sole participant from my last newsletter. You can see Caroline’s participation at the bottom of this newsletter. Until a later time, Audience Participation has been eliminated from the newsletter line-up.
Indeed, I neglected to send a newsletter last Wednesday. I had some out-of-town visitors and was simultaneously feeling sad. Maybe I was healing.
For the third week, I am offering ten prints of the “You Are Doing A Good Enough Job” banner, which you can see at the top of this newsletter. These are $8 including shipping, and I’d be happy to send one or two or three to a friend of yours with a note from you, if you can think of someone who needs to hear it.
Extras.
I finished reading Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke last week. I felt a lot of mixed things about it. It theorizes that we currently have too much access to dopamine as a culture, which is actually making us a lot less happy and fulfilled. I found this concept pretty challenging, and there was a lot in here that frustrated me. The brain science, however, is fascinating, and I found the chapter on radical honesty to be enlightening and incredibly helpful. I’m not sure that I recommend this book, but I do think that it offers some great science about addiction that might be interesting to people who struggle with wanting to leave their own discomfort a lot.
I’m still listening to Green-House almost nonstop, and have discovered their Instagram. It is the literal best.
This week I’m all about Rice Chex.
Edith Zimmerman has one of my favorite newsletters, called Drawing Links. I dream about it. Her comics feel really truthful and abundant, and her work ethic amazes me. (She is the same amount of pregnant I am and is still going on RUNS somehow?!)
I’ve also been re-immersing myself in all the book-length projects by Liana Finck, and Excuse Me in particular is just so fucking intelligent and funny and addicting.
One of my favorite living cartoonists, Emily Bernstein, just spent some time in France and chronicled it beautifully on her Instagram.
On my OWN Instagram, I have been leaning in to birds and feelings. I wrote an assignment for dealing with tricky emotions that I recommend you try!
I like Only Murders In The Building so far. A lot of well-polished fun.
From Caroline Wold:
Layla and I hold hands when she’s feeling a little concerned about the mailman at the door. I like feeling responsible for a living thing, and feeling like I can give her a little bit of comfort!
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your newsletter! I find so many nuggets of kinship and wisdom that I can just roll around like tiny pebbles in my mind for days. I really like Luke's insight about our bodies just knowing they need a break.
Found you on IG, kinda randomly. I’ve shared a couple bird posts - they’re tops! First time looking at your substack; I’ll comment in the future when I’ve got something to say…thx