My Favorite Drawing Of All Time

PLUS: Guess where I am rn? You can guess, and by the end, you’ll know the answer.

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear Friend,

I have made one drawing that is more important to me than any other drawing. 

I conceptualized it on a treadmill in my basement. I thought, “I want to write something funny. I never make funny comics anymore. But I can’t think of any jokes. I can’t think of anything true at this moment¹ except for one thing.”

I wrote the one thing down, deciding that maybe I’d draw it, why not. That night, my husband Luke took an hours-long phone call with his friends from home. Alone our room, probably definitely just rewatching “Gilmore Girls” again, I drew my thought — the only thing I knew to be true — and knew immediately that it was amazing. I fell asleep and dreamed about soft cats. 

The next morning, I posted the drawing on Instagram. At the time, I had just over 2,000 followers, and for the first time, something I posted started to really gain traction. It’s a special thing, when you love something you make AND everyone else loves it too. I don’t know that I’d say the post went viral, but it was the first thing I posted that garnered more than 1,000 Likes.

OK, OK. I’ll stop lollygagging and show you the post. Here:

At this time in my life, I was eating BROCCOLI MEAL six times per week. BROCCOLI MEAL was just a head of broccoli, torn up, be-oiled and spiced, and roasted in the oven for thirty minutes. Then I added quinoa and hummus. Sometimes I also made sweet potato, but I found it unnecessary. My love of broccoli was central to my identity, and it Just. Felt. Right. 

I wish I could return to those days; when you’re hyperfixated on a meal, so much of your life gets immediately so much easier. The blare of decision fatigue whittles itself to a dry whisper. If you can eat the same thing every single day and feel ecstatic about it, and if the thing is cheap and easy to make, you have conquered something critical about being alive. Unfortunately, over time, BROCCOLI MEAL got worse. Once I put some expired vegan parmesan on it. More than once I overcooked the broccoli. You only have to ruin a meal once or twice to eliminate its shine. It’s a shame.

Nevertheless, I have continued to love the Broccoli Man with All His Muscles. He really does it for me. I had him made into a sticker. My best friend Bethany told me that Broccoli Man was her favorite of my stickers, and I agreed: he could take a plastic water bottle to another level. Broccoli Man proved to be a successful sticker overall, and at some point, I sold out of him. 

Well, I mostly sold out of him. In June of last year, I had two Broccoli Man stickers left, but I chose not to list them on my website, because I knew I was saving them for something special — I just didn’t know what it was yet. 

Here is how I used the first one: a person I had never met (let’s call him Leonard) ordered a pack of stickers from me, and listed Mushrooms and Octopus as his two sticker picks. But in the “gift note” section of the order, he wrote: “This is not a gift message but a message for Sophie!! I put octopus as my second sticker but what I really, really want is broccoli man! I used to have a broccoli man sticker on my water bottle but I lost that water bottle and I miss it and the broccoli man sticker! I hope to recreate that joy on a new water bottle…”

TBH, I was moved. The Broccoli Man had spoken to this Leonard person in California. I sent a reply email, no subject, that said: “You will receive broccoli man.” 

And off went Broccoli Man to Leonard. 

Well, that’s what I *thought.* The order came in during the summer — a time when I am traditionally bad at fulfilling orders. I thought I’d sent the stickers, but since I hand-lettered the envelope, I didn’t have a tracking number, and I wasn’t positive. One day, I went out for brunch with Bethany (Bethany loves chilaquiles an amount that can only be described as charming), and Broccoli Man came up. I can’t remember the context, only the sharp realization that I WASN’T POSITIVE I’D SENT LEONARD HIS STICKERS. 

Another email: “let me know when your stickers arrive. I feel sure that I sent them, but on the other hand, I'm not positive. If they're not there in five days, I'll send six stickers instead of four and apologize profusely.”

But an apology wasn’t necessary; Leonard told me the stickers had arrived. He liked them! He said thank you. 

I received this email on August 10, 2023. If I had received it in January, or April, or any other non-August month, I would have said, “I’ll definitely keep my eyes peeled. Here are some good Facebook groups you might check out!” Because I didn’t know Leonard at all; he had no social media presence (seriously, zero), and I wasn’t even sure how he had found me and my Broccoli Man stickers in the first place. 

However, my partner Bob and his partner Sophia (All these partners! All these Sophie/as!) had just visited for ten days. When they arrived, I was emerging from a deeply dark time (I’ve referenced this before, and am still not ready to write about it! Such is the depth of the dark! Maybe one day.), and I didn’t feel at all like I had the capacity to be a host. Luckily, they were coming, at least in part, because I’d asked for help. On the phone, Bob had said, “Are you kidding!? I’m SO EXCITED you’re open to letting me help!” I’d never had anyone come to my house just to help before and wasn’t sure how it was going to work, and I was nervous. But they came. I made their bed and left plastic horses in their room, for whimsy. 

The first day they were there, I went to work, and came home to all of my toddler T’s toys organized by color and shape; an old cardboard box had been fashioned into a kind of fort for her. The dishes were clean; surfaces that had been suffocating for months were suddenly cleared. I looked at a rainbow of rubber animals tidily stacked on a table near the upstairs bathroom and burst into tears. I felt like a sick person being nursed back to health in a movie!? That’s the only way to describe it. You know how, like, an injured person will take a cupful of water from a kindly nurse when it’s 1845 or whatever? It felt like that, every day.

This is a picture Sophia took of Bob taking a picture of me taking a picture of Luke and T. I love this picture; everyone is taking pictures of people they love, and loving looking at the people they love love other people.

Bob and Sophia had dinner with us every night. Some nights I cooked, some nights Luke did, some nights Bob or Sophia did. While everything was helpful (I don’t know that our deck has ever been or will ever be that clean again), I loved the dinners most. I loved sharing and appreciating food, talking with people whose lives are different from mine, and having an extra set of hands for the Tupperware-filling and dishes-drying tasks. I thought, “If there was a way for these two people to just live in that room, I’d never ask for rent or grocery money; I’d just be grateful every single day that they were there.” 

But they left. Because they have lives, and actually, ten days was QUITE generous. I found the plastic horses arranged thoughtfully on the night table; a final tableaux that, in their honor, I refused to unmoor.

They left, and then Leonard asked if I knew about a place to sublet.

At dinner, I said to Luke, “This is probably a bad and stupid idea, but I’m just going to put it out there. What if this sticker patron sublets our empty room for a while?” Luke was way too eager about it. He said we could use the extra money. I said, “Yeah… but what if, like… we didn’t charge him very much and asked him instead if he wanted to like… be in our community?” Luke said that never mind, that was sort of a bad and stupid idea, because people aren’t mostly good. People are mostly capitalists.

Nevertheless, I floated it by Leonard. I mean, I asked him what his deal was, how long he wanted to stay, etc. I told him about our guest room, about our toddler, about our hippy dippy lifestyle, and about what I dreamed of in a roommate. And I said that, while I was nervous about offering, I was offering. 

There is more to this story. The email I sent Leonard was (truly, no exaggeration) 1,000 words long. We met over Zoom, and neither of us was sure about the other one, but we agreed that if it wasn’t a fit, we’d cut it off early. He’d pay a small weekly rent, and we’d just SEE HOW IT WORKED OUT. 

The first day Leonard lived in our house, he and I did a crossword puzzle together. I am basically constantly looking for people to crossword-date — that is, people to sit next to and speed through the Sunday Times Magazine back page with. This is something my husband does not like to do, and it’s not as much fun to do it by myself. I prefer to spend an hour eating green grapes and discussing trivia about Greek gods and who won the 1984 Grammy for Best New Artist. I do have some crossword-relationships in my life (actually, Bob is my Primary Crossword Partner), but I don’t see these people as much as I’d like to. It was immediately clear that Leonard and I were Crossword Compatible. A good sign. 

Leonard was a vegetarian (a good sign), and had attended Unitarian summer camp in his life (a good sign). Within, like, three days, I couldn’t stop texting him. Best of all, he stayed for dinner pretty much every night. Once or twice a week, he cooked. He made truly exceptional chocolate chip cookies. Luke, T, Leonard and I started watching “Bake-Off” together. When Leonard borrowed the car, he put gas in it, and brought in some of the loose trash. None of these small things felt small.

One night, our babysitter got sick and couldn’t come over. Luke and I had been excited to go to a birthday party, but now one of us was going to have to stay home. Leonard was studying Arabic in the dining room and said, “Oh, I can watch T!”

I kind of gaped at him. “She’s two,” I said. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

”Sure! I’ll show her Arabic alphabet music videos.”

Which is what he did. She still loves to watch them. Leonard logged a lot of hours with T, and she grew to trust him. His is one of the only adult names she knows. 

Relationships are so much about time spent. Researchers have found that it takes 200 hours of time spent together for people to go from being acquaintances to friends. Maybe that’s why people get close at work, when they physically share office space, or are always having lunch at the same sticky lounge room table. When you live in the same house, 200 hours is breezy — it can easily happen in a calendar month. Two calendar months was what we got with Leonard before he found his own apartment.

Not every roommate relationship works out well, and you already know that. I’ve lived with people with whom there was no gelling, no collective joy, no chocolate cookies at all. I’ve actually never lived alone, and it’s also rare for me to meet someone who doesn’t say they prefer living alone. I think I thought I would prefer it, but in fact, what I prefer is alone time. I want a lot of alone time, where it’s just me and my book and my tea and my weird theremin music. But then, at some point, I want to be reminded that I’m not alone; that if I spill milk and for some reason cry over it, someone else will help me clean it up. At some point in my day, I want to share: resources, stories, time. I want someone to lift me out of my own life and let me settle into theirs. I like that I’m not solitary in appreciating that the dishes get clean; that if I cut some of the flowers from the side yard and put them in a big jar, another person will remark that they smell surprising. I like for joy to get a little bit loud. Maybe even unruly. Maybe this isn’t just a thing we like: maybe it’s a thing we need.

The day Leonard moved, I was moody. 

“I’m sorry Leonard is moving. It makes sense that you’re sad,” Bethany said to me. I hadn’t liked when she and her family had moved out, either. But the house got too small for our four adult selves plus the two new baby selves who’d moved in over the course of the year 2021. I smile to myself whenever Bethany says, “It makes sense that you [feel feeling]” to me — which she does at least one time per day. She’s spent the time to learn that “it makes sense” is the thing I want to hear most. Bethany moved out over a year ago. She loves her new condo; her new neighborhood thrums and contains multiple farm-to-table restaurants and eclectic speakeasies; the people in the condo downstairs said they’d watch the baby monitor if she and her husband ever wanted to go out for a late dinner. The neighbors offered that, I know, because Bethany is the kind of person who says hello and means it. I know because I got to be her neighbor. And now she knows me. We haven’t unlearned each other just because she moved away.

Here are Bethany’s and my feet as we reached the end of an eight-mile walk together over the summer.

Leonard kept coming over to finish off the season of “Bake-Off.” We were devastated during the semifinals, but pleasantly surprised for the season finale. Then when it was over, he said he wanted to come for dinner once a week — “How about Mondays?”

The first Monday he came was easy. The weather was normal, and he came on his way home from school. But the second Monday he was supposed to come was both Martin Luther King Junior Day and zero degrees. “I’m still coming,” he texted. This shocked me. But he said that he wanted to make the dinners a habit, and he believed that if you want something to become a habit, then if you can do it, even if it is hard, you should do it. No excuses. I drove him home.

The day after Leonard left, I got the other Broccoli Man sticker and put it on the metal trash can in the bathroom that had been his for two months. I want the Broccoli Man to say, “This place has been changed. Don’t forget.” (The bedroom doesn’t have a good trash can for this, and plus it’s super dark, and plus I don’t go in it very often. But sure, I guess it’s kind of weird that I did this in a bathroom. Whatever: you can’t unstick a sticker.)

Whenever Leonard comes over, T’s face lights up. “LEONARD!” She says. Only, she says his real name. Which is not Leonard. But you get it. This is the kind of thing that matters.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

HOUSEKEEPING:

You can buy a Broccoli Man T-shirt! I did! To commemorate this beautiful story from my life! Here is me wearing it!

I still have several prints left of this month’s “You Are Doing A Good Enough Job” limited edition! I can send them internationally for free (Enter discount code FREESHIPPRINT at checkout), which I forgot to mention, and also forgot to fix in my shipping options. Take advantage!

Or, subscribe to the paid tier of this newsletter. If you’ve been on the fence, but you’ve been thinking about it, this is your sign! We are about to get a new book club book!

LOOSE THOUGHTS:

• I’m headed to New Orleans for a week. I Feel Things about this. 

• Like what kind of things? I don’t know — it’s a place I feel like I can’t go back to, because the person who lived there doesn’t fully exist anymore. I can’t explain it very well, but I’ve been trying really hard to in therapy.

• Anyway, I’m once again on an airplane, which might be my favorite place to write.

• And on the way to the airport, I rode in the back of a Lyft, and looked out the window, and it was night, and I remembered that is there anything better, really, than getting to gaze into lit windows when it’s dark out? You can see people exercising, ordering Mexican food, having a first date, putting on their socks. I saw all of these things. Their nights went on in other directions, and mine went on in this one.

• Yes, you’re right, that’s four bullet points for essentially just one topic.

  

1. The moment was: The height of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic