Last time in the art installment of my newsletter I showed the pages of this sketchbook that came about after I finished the set of pencils I started out with and really didn’t like. They were super hard and lay very little colour down on the paper. This sketchbook has porous pages with a lot of tooth which brought out a little life in those pencils, but it’s also fragile and layers of it come off at too much friction. The pencils needed just that, arduous colour on top of colour for many hours. My wrist almost didn’t let me finish, but I’m stubborn.

After using up this set, which took a long, long time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to honour all the bad art materials I’d gathered when I first started drawing and didn’t know anything (now I know 3% more, but it’s proving substantial in some ways).

Life is very short and as much of a cliche as that is, I have been incredibly aware of it recently. If I had unlimited time I might spend a few centuries simply going off into these sorts of little quests to see what comes of them, but I don’t so I have to reconsider and start using the nice materials I have while I can, then enjoy buying new ones and start again. I hope I’ll never get over it, but for now it’s the most satisfying of things.

This particular side quest has yielded surprising results. I started with geometrical forms (see below the gallery) and then, without making a conscious decision they morphed into more than just basic geometry. This pencil set pushed me, gently, towards things I didn’t, at the time, think I could do. The compositions I was going for didn’t really come to be in the way I envisioned them, but I kept going, from exploration to exploration and they led me to more figurative results. Each page started with questioning forms and what they could be, meaning that I put down a shape, filled it in and then attached another one to it, searching to make it different, to discover one I hadn’t tried before. It’s essentially a “what if” process. What if I go this way, what if I start with half a circle, what if I put this tear drop shape down?

I love being surprised, I love to be delighted by something unexpected, an idea, a gesture, a shape. It’s a short and profound startling, it jolts me, momentarily out of the ruts I’m in, or simply interrupts a little the routine, helping me make it more satisfying, or more me, or to just wake me up a little bit, like an altered state of consciousness. I’m incredibly fond of those, they reshape reality and allow me to explore beyond my regular mental patterns.

One fenomenon that happens when I start a project is that I have a loose or tight mental image of the result, a plan of sorts, but when colour touched page what I’ve intended turns into something else. This is partially because I have no idea what I’m doing and so the image gets translated through my skill level of the moment. It can be frustrating if I’m hung up on that plan, but extremely satisfying when I let myself do what I can. That’s where the surprises come from. All the fumbling is well worth it when I look at the result and wonder where it came from and why it’s somehow better than what I wanted initially.

All of this is actually another way of saying that exploration is my absolute favourite things in the world. This sketchbook was an exercise in letting go and following the line to see where it can take me.

I constantly imagine a life where I’m not sick and limited and I’m also unrestricted by time. In all of those fantasies all I ever want to do is explore. Most of the fantasy books I read are about conflict, which usually translates to war, to conquering, to fighting off conquerors etc., and it gets tedious. It seems pure exploration is not a subject the publishing world appreciates, maybe it cannot be done well, maybe no one has tried.

Exploration, for me, is an openness, it isn’t marred by urgency, pressure, destination, so maybe exploration as a theme, a guiding light, is hard to transform into a page-turning story. Curiosity, anticipation, satisfaction are the adjectives I’d attach to exploration. Some others are quiet repetition, patience, contentment. I’d cultivate those above most others if I were blessed with limitlessness. Only the thought at all that searching, full bodied, meaty, voluptuous blisses me out. How would being able to do it for an eternity, or a quasi-eternity be like?

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I decided I’ll use nice paper for my pencil drawings because I might want to sell them someday. That’s a breakthrough, I never considered that a possibility before. I don’t mean super expensive stuff, but at least acid free so they won’t yellow in time. And all the super cheap sketchbooks can be for all the failures and attempts to depict the world (something I’m still pretty bad at).

It’s a small change of direction, but momentous enough. It means I’m not afraid to call myself an artist. I don’t care about labels generally, but this had never even entered my mind as something I could think about let alone become. A few days ago I was in bed reading and looked over at my desk with deep hunger for the shapes waiting for me there and I thought for the first time that I’ve become an artist; what a strangeness, what a joy. I’ll be amazed about it for a while.

The decision to work with better materials was also prompted by the fact that I finished a sketchbook and some of the pages came out surprisingly well. I’ll share all of it in the next liquid marvellous installment. I could of course redo them on better paper, but I’m in a stage of life and art when my only urge is to keep going forward, try new things, discover more, attempt new shapes, new lines. It’s a frantic desire to celebrate all that can exist, so I have to allow myself to run ahead and uncover as much as I can.

I started this one because I had a set of hard pencils which worked best on paper with a fair amount of tooth. They laid little colour on the paper and so seemed less than satisfying for me. Nonetheless I wanted to finish them - a little obsession with using up all my materials. In the end these not so good pencils taught me a fair amount. They helped me discover a technique I hadn’t used before and a way of filling a page that I’d seen as too simple and therefore not valuable enough. I’ve changed my mind in the meantime. I enjoy having my mind shift in this way: I entertain some thoughts and I’m sure they’re made of really hard material, unbreakable and then they melt away with such ease to make room for deeper discoveries, for insights I hadn’t been privileged to have before.

The sketchbook took forever, around two years. I finished the pencils a few pages before the end of the sketchbook so I was free to play with better materials and that completely changed the direction of the concepts that appeared on the page. There’s more freedom in what I create now, less fear that things should look a certain way, that one aesthetic is above others. This also means I try the shapes and techniques I’m afraid of, or I think I’m bad at and so I never use.

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Blank days used to disturb me. They are those in which I wake up and I have no direction, and even worse, no desire. I don’t know what to do with such days. How do I live in them? Am I even allowed to exist in this desireless, formless state?

It crossed my mind now that they might sound restful, no desire to impede on the mere fact of existence, yet they are anything but. A fear and a restlessness come over me and no place is comfortable enough because I’ve been deprived of my wants, my strivings, the burden of the many directions pulling at me.

What’s most unsettling about them is I don’t necessarily wake up feeling sicker or more tired than usual, and unable to detect a particular reason for my apathy, I get anxious fearing I’ve lost the inner engine that keeps me going. Once I stop wanting tlife becomes pointless. Recently someone wrote a note about desire outside of romantic contexts, and it made me think about how much of what is worthwhile, or pleasurable in life comes from wanting; desiring to reach a place, to possess something, to accomplish a feat, to experience something new and thrilling or old and satisfying. They don’t have to be huge things, but enough to take you over to the next day.

The tiniest things can do that for me, looking forward to seeing the cactus flowers opening in the morning, mixing green and pink in a drawing, knowing tomorrow I can have coffee because I don’t wake up early the next day, leftover pizza in the fridge, the longing for a song that liquefies me. Combined with the feeling of anticipation they are two of those absolutely delicious human experiences that add texture to life and allow me to walk ahead ready for an unknowable and hopefully fulfilling future.

All I’ve wanted for years now was to rest my poor overactive brain and sick body, but blankness doesn’t do that, it acts more like an erasure. I’m simply empty. If I’m a voided vessel, purposeless, despair and despondency seep in from wherever they usually live.

I recently had a few such days; drawings were waiting on my desk, the notebooks I write my novel in on the shelf, at hand, almost infinite amounts of series at my fingertips, hundreds of books I haven’t managed to read yet in the bookshelf and on my phone, the art I look at out of sheer joy, all were far away and said nothing to me. I couldn’t take anything in, I could find no pleasure, no enthusiasm, no grace. When you live with a lot of limitations like I do, having some inner ability to manufacture energy from nothingness is essential. My curiosity and enthusiasm are my tools of choice for survival, when they are not accessible I panic, because I’m reminded with stark vividness of all the things I cannot do or have, of how I and most people get minced finely by living. Immersed in my pursuits I transform my days into enormous and beautiful houses of exploration, without them the days devolve into worse than horror, into monotonous, painful muck, a repetition at nauseam of pointless suffering.

Fortunately I’ve been through a few of these and I know that enthusiasm always comes back, the pleasure of discovering stories, of exploring where pencil lines can take me, of finding out where colour deposits me. I’ve learnt to bear days like these with the faith that I’ll rediscover myself soon enough.

Faith is a medium bluish-purple word, it starts strong with the violet of F, gets watered down but the white of A and the grey of I and H, but is kept intact by the dependable blue of T. My synaesthesia always helps, it never turns off, so I tell myself I have faith that the void of that day will run its course and leave room for the inner solar explosions I’m used to, and the colour of the word helps me not become invisible to myself.

Faith, I say in my head and the word is soft and fuzzy. I lie down in the balcony chair bed and pull the burgundy fluffy blanket over my legs. Faith, I say again and let the colour bloom in my brain, the way the little magenta flowers of my cactus do every spring, startling me because I never expect them.

Some oil pastel sketchbook pages. They have no direction, no preparation, only a desire to lay down colour.

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Forgetting myself

Someone asked me recently how I started drawing and after answering I realised the narrative I built around the beginning of my obsession with colour and line had been incomplete, I’d forgotten all about the true incipient pulls toward it.

Not that long ago (a mere couple of years), a time of deep hardship and a serendipitous experiment with gel pens and cardboard pushed me to try and colour away my grief and trauma. But long before that, as a child in middle-school, obsessed with an anime, I’d spend countless hours in my corner of the apartment and later the derelict house my parents bought in the country, copying, then strenghtening the line of that stolen sketch with the tiniest brush I could find. There were days I didn’t come out of the room or want to eat so focused on the work of bringing fourth the romantic visions of my preteen passion.

They were a sort of collage. I didn’t cut and paste together pieces of paper, but I’d put the sheet of white paper over images with various character configurations and copy only the bit that I wanted, mixing and matching and building on the story that had so captured my little naive soul.

I had completely forgotten that fascination, which had the exact same quality of the present one, almost thirty years later. Now, on some free days I sit at the desk and start drawing and only reluctantly get up to go to the bathroom. Hours later I’m still hungry for the touch of pencil or pastel to paper. Being in that place of countless little creative decisions is wildly satisfying, the same way it was for me as a child, although now I take risk impossible to imagine for my young self.

It took me all these decades to make the connection and figure out that this is the kind of work that I’d always been attracted to. Living a human existence constantly suprises me with how much you have to travel to understand simple, basic things about yourself. I had completely forgotten that self, with her joys and passions and couldn’t use her to make my life different, richer maybe.

I wonder how many selves I’ve forgotten and left behind and what wondrous things they took with them into oblivion. What other secrets did I lose? It’s an exploration I’m setting out to undertake, an archeology of the self that thrills me all of sudden.

Filler drawings

On another note in the last few weeks I didn’t draw anything that came together too well. I just wanted to put pencil to paper. I started a drawing I think will come out well, but I’m taking it slowly doing a bit at a time, otherwise I get overwhelmed and I make mistakes in the rush to see it finished.

All the rest are things that I started without a plan and I just experimented at the level of energy of the day, the less energy the worst the creative decisions. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is investing time in the practice. I started calling the results of such days filler drawings.

They keep me present to the practice even if they are failed experiments; wrong colour choices, details I figured out too late I needed, a composition that doesn’t work, proportions gone wrong. But in all of them there’s something that I enjoy looking at or laughing at. I got the texture of grass in a way I like, I drew a lizard I’m proud of, or I made a blunder that is so silly it makes me guffaw when I see it again.

This is the best part about drawing, for me. It’s as low stakes as possible, I’m not gunning for a particular result. All I want is to fill my days with pleasure and learn at my own rhythm.

Here are some of them for your pleasure and maybe laughter.

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When I started work as an 18-year-old I calculated how many salaries I’d need to buy a tiny apartment of my own and it came to 400 years. It broke my heart. But I was young and determined and I thought that if I dedicated myself body and soul to work I might make something happen. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t have enough money for nutritious food or any time for cooking for that matter and as a result something did happen, I got sick, and have been so ever since.

I have good days, from time to time, but most of the days I walk through a jello of pain and fatigue so intense I can barely make it 12 hours awake. I work nonetheless, but the curse of the 400 years has not left me. Now it also has the added dread of never being able to retire. The money I do make is too little for any comfort in old age. So I worry about everything; I house a harried animal inside me, crazed by all the things I try to do to survive, it runs around my organs, all over my organs, it rips through them sometimes, which adds extra layers of agony.

With the little money I can spare I buy cheap oil pastels and coloured pencils and draw as if my life depended on it. It might, I don’k know. What I do know is that I’d like to draw every waking moment. When I draw I am satisfied, much calmer than at any other time, sheltered, as if I’m missing nothing. I forget my illness, I forget the bills, I suddenly become rich, rich in colour. It’s my only treasure and I hoard it like a a very old dragon hoards its gold. It crossed my mind that dragons must be very anxious creatures if they need to sleep on their piles of coins and jewellery and I sympathize.

Here’s some of my gold. A selection from a recently finished sketchbook. I hope you like them.

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I have the impression I drew so much less in June.

It was a month of even more medication adjustments, these are always, always dreadful. I must feel so much worse before I feel better, it’s an unfortunate prerequisite. The change takes time to take hold, there’s a lot of trial and error so lots of waiting to feel human. On top of that I had some other health crisis, doctor’s appointments. If I could never see a doctor in my life again it still won’t be enough. I just loathe them. They’re dreadful. Not to mention the hole such a thing makes in my already shaky financial situation.

Driving school was on the list as well. I’ve been meaning to learn to drive since 2019 and then lots of life happened and it wasn’t possible. It’s an exciting and nerve-wreaking development. Another huge chunk of money gone, cue me shaking with worry. I consider it an investment, but that doesn’t do anything about the anxiety.

I’m officially peri-menopausal and suprisingly this has brought some stability to my super sensitive body. Some symptoms I’ve had for the last 20 years are gone or much dimished. I’m mentally more resilient, I don’t feel as blown in the wind as I used to, so silver linings. I was really hoping this period of my life would come with some relief and unlike my previous record with wishful thinking, this time it’s going my way.

It was my birthday, I tried a new restaurant and it was disappointing, I tried a massage and it was disappointing and overwhelming. I should’ve stuck with going to the movies and a walk, those never fail to be great experiences for my neurodivergent brain.

Here’s what I managed to produce:

I always work in multiple sketckbooks, or on individual sheets of paper, I have a huge pile of types of paper and notebooks to my right, at my desk (imagine a blocky building 20cm high), that I constantly work through according to mood. I read the same way. Chaos and abundance is just my hardwiring.

First a messy A5 sketchbook. I returned to my cheaper oil pastels. I’ve been luxuriating in my play with the creamier, better quality ones and I have to use up these ones as well. They also allow me freedom to draw ugly things, to make mistakes, to just putter around being silly. And as I always will, you need to see both the nicer results and the failures.

I don’t know why I have this deep reluctance to use reference photos or just draw objects from around me and when I’m uninspired the results are really bad.

A random piece of paper constantly falling from my planner

Only one page of oil pastel layering.

A better quality A4 sketchbook for my favourite pastels.

A5 acrylic marker sketchbook.

A4 cardboard sheets of different qualities, coloured pencils.

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It startled me to wake up today and realise it’s the first weekend in June, well, half a weekend. I admit I wasn’t prepared.

In the last few weeks I’ve ironed out what kind of material I want to share in this newsletter, and there are only three weeks of the month that are accounted for. The fourth could’ve been an essay, a photo essay, something else, or nothing. I allowed myself the kindness of skipping a week if things in my life limited my time, or just to rest and create more organically. I though this was one of those break weekends and had not planned anything, but since it’s the beginning of June, the May retrospective just begged to be added.

The break week functions as a constant reminder that this is a pleasure and not a job, which helps me to not stress about producing. I want to keep all my hobbies as labours of love and to think of them with the same enthusiams and deep passion that made me begin.

My mind often goes to “what if something more can come out of this” and I have to snap myself out of it because it adds a layer of lead onto my shoulders, which I refuse to carry. So I often tell myself that I write because I’m drawn inexorably to it, because I can’t stop myself and there are stories in my brain, giddy with nervous energy, waiting for me to pave their way to the world; that I draw because it wakes me up and fills my days with wonder and surprises, with unparralelled satisfaction.

June used to be the month of bliss, the beginning of summer vacation. I dearly miss the three months of no pressure. As a child I didn’t know what to do with them even as I relished the lack of anxiety they afforded me, but now there would be so much I could do. June also used to be the official arrival of my favourite season, the sweet, easy heat of summer that softened everything, the season of long walks, of languour, of escapes in nature. Now I’m scared. It means heatwaves and temperatures that go over 40 degrees Celsius, the air outside suffocating, the air inside clinging to me wet and musty. My apartment faces the south and it heats up like a looking glass, boiling me inside as I do my best to live and work. I’m bracing myself for this season in hell and wait for September when breathing is easy again.

May this year brought cold days and rain, and I received it with the hunger of someone who knows she will soon starve. The relief of colder weather maintained my energy high enough so I could handle better the health crises, doctors appointments, medication I had to make charts for so I don’t forget in what order to take them. May tested me. I drew less, I read more. Drawing leans more heavily towards a physical experience rather than an intellectual one and that’s part of its allure for me, but it means that when my energy is spent somewhere else or it wanes I can’t do too much. So May was almost invisible, a blur of worries and trips away from my desk.

Here’s what I created:

My nicer oil pastels have gotten a new sketchbook and I’m pretty satisfied with the chaos of the first page.

I finally managed to use markers in a way that looks pleasing to me. It’s a start.

I’m still figuring out what to do with acrylic markers, sometimes I get really fun result, other times I draw myself into a corner. This came somewhere in the middle. I like some parts of it, others are forced. I have to find the right balance in the amount of details. When I look at art, texture and surprising details attract my eye and give me intense pleasure. My mission is to learn to put the right type of texture and interest into an image.

This sketchbook holds the attempts at finishing some pencils. I didn’t use to like them, but the more I work on using them up the more I enjoy the results.

Another in the same category, a bit cruder. I like them smoother, but had no patience with this one.

Another one in the same sketchbook, these take a long time, but are super relaxing mentally, when I work or I’m drained the level of decision making is small yet rewarding.

The set of metallic brush markers I thought I hated have become extremely fun to use. I forced myself to keep some negative space. My obsession with filling every millimetre of the page doesn’t always do me favours.

I noticed that the combination of regular and metallic does the trick on these ones.

An almost something that I might explore further in other images.

Six fingered hands because why not.

Five fingers and a hidden thumb.

I started this for the post below and didn’t finish it in time to feature it there.

If there is something I love is being able to layer oil pastels. It’s never-endingly entertaining.

The only character I managed this month, I have to put muscle into working with these particular pastels and there wasn’t enough energy left for it.

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April should have a been a great month. I took a two-week vacation and was hoping to clear my mind and bask in the freedom of doing anything I want, and not worry about life; wrap myself in days of possibility, the way I did as a child. I mourn summer holidays, the three months of living in the garden of eden without any pressure or demand. Now summer is in April and May before the heatwaves hit with over 40 degrees Celsius and even breathing becomes a labour.

Instead my left shoulder froze up or something, pain started shooting down my arm, my index and middle finger became numb and I couldn’t move for five whole days. Basically the whole first week was lost with me immobilized in bed between as many pillows as possible to keep the shoulder in the one position that didn’t make me scream.

I managed a few walks, one before and a few after the worst days. The one before I took a strong painkiller to avoid bending in pain every three steps and I managed a few great shots. I’m thinking of including a photo essay every month to actually use all the shots I’m proud of.

In the end I squeezed as much joy of the two weeks as I could. While immobilized I listened to books and watched long youtube videos I didn’t have time to get to before. It wasn’t lost time, but it wasn’t the time I’d planned and wanted. I’m still processing its loss.

Here’s what I drew at the beginning of the month before the whole kerfuffle.

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Another of those pages with a gouache background that resulted in something completely different. I really like this one.

New paper and new pencils. I tried a new technique to see what I can accomplish and I love some parts of this, others still need work, but overall super happy with the result.

This was the outcome of a day without inspiration, but in the end I’m not mad with it, it’s more of a sketchbook play session.

As a watercolour newbie I find it super hard, especially because there are down times when things need to dry. It’s a way of working on a piece I’m not used to and have to find an approach that doesn’t break the spell and ruin the end result.

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This was a bit of fun that I’m really pleased with. More cartoony and childlike, but the lines are lovely. I have to do more stuff in this vain.

My critters have received rooms and now a sense of claustrophobia emanates from them. I wanted to change things up and play with a little perspective. There’s a lot of resistence because it’s not an intuitive thing. I need to work at it even if the result is not necessarily pleasing. But I’m a believer in celebrating failures as well as successes. Failures are much more common, and in the spirit of extracting all the joy from life, using them for all they can teach me has been the way to go to keep me excited about the new and the scary.

I have some old alcohol markers that I find very difficult to use, but I stubbornly want to finish them so I make these silly animals. They are blind contour drawings and I have been pleasantly suprised by some of the results.

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I bought a small pack of brush markers and didn’t pay attention that they are metallic, which I hate. Now I have to find a way to use them up. One down, many more to go.

Another on the “let’s use up these metallic markers” mission. A bit of a failure, but so what.

Art is one place where I’m not self-conscious. Not that I wouldn’t want to be able to create what others can, it’s just that there are no stakes. It’s just joy. I don’t pretend to be an artist, I just experiment. I allow my joy and the limitations I have and I place on myself in the moment — related to small palettes, or certain shapes, or whatever — to just go where they go. I explore series of drawings and then I branch into something completely different when I’m bored or tired of that one particular practice.

Giving myself the permission and freedom to practice art in all the intuitive ways that feel good to me is one of the best decisions of my life. One of the extremely few constant, always alive joys at my disposal.

The liquid marvellous section of this substack will be about the art itself and less about words. If I have words good, if not the art will speak for itself, childhish, silly, fauviste, awkward, harmonious by chance, and any other shape it might take.

One thing I’ll never get used to is the way chronic illness moves me like a marrionette in stops and starts.

My medications need to be adjusted regularly, but it’s not a set time, it’s a question of how I’m managing, the levels of energy I have, a variety of other symptoms. Blood tests are sometimes helpful, sometimes not because too many things are at play, also they’re expensive. Which means I have to wait to get progressively worse until I know for sure that I have to make the adjustment.

One day of feeling unlike myself, even a whole week is not enough to know for sure. Even in my best periods I have bad days. So I have to pay attention and figure out if it’s a regular not ok or it’s a serious not ok. I never guess in time because, actually, there’s not way to, although I keep hoping that I will.

Adjusting medication is also tricky because it has to be done slowly, and it takes time for me to come back to the fragile equilibrium that keeps me functional. When I’m like that every task is the size of an elephant I’m forced to drag around. I stop having any ideas or enthusiam of any kind. Which means I can’t keep up with everything I have on my plate. I cut out all but the essential, which is work (because I have to eat) and a little bit of creativity, stunted as it is by my body’s weakeness. Writing is out of the question, it demands too much of me. But I did manage to draw a little.

Here’s what I produced while I wasn’t myself:

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Just this drawing this week. I like the liquid feeling of it.

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The construction work in my apartment has swelled like a bubble in my brain and it clouds other parts of my mind. My anxious streak is in full force, not letting me enjoy the time I have for myself when I have it.

The novel I’m working on is sucking me dry and now I’m writing this to avoid finding out what is going to happen next. I’m actually a bit lost and flailing. I’m writing it without any map, without an outline, it’s an exercise in faith, a deliberate practice of free play and it makes me terribly uncomfortable. I started it for the sole purpose of having fun with my writing, to shift the perspective of writing as this super high stakes endeavour to something that simply allows me to create and it’s a hard shift. For a while I wrote a little and then took a few days of break to figure out where to go next, but then, more than a few days went by without me doing any writing, although I had a full scene in my head. The more I stayed away, the more scared I was to come back.

By chance I found myself part of a Get It Done challenge, a ten week writing effort by the wonderful Jennifer Lauck, whose riveting serialised memoir I get to read, and I’m doing my best to stick with it. The only days when I don’t write are when I’m not at home physically. I don’t have a big daily goal, because between my day job, the construction site and my illness there isn’t all that much time or energy, but I try to write at least 200 words every day. It seems very little, but it compensates with days of 1000 words when I get a burst of images that need to be put to paper. Today there’s nothing in me, but I will still force myself to write these 200 words. Initially, I was afraid that I was just going to ramble and go nowhere because I didn’t have the time to consider what I want to happen next, but I got little unexpected breakthroughs that encouraged me to stick with it.

Writing a novel is a confounding experience. In my 30s I was afraid of it and stuck to writing stories instead because I didn’t believe I could take on such a huge project. I might have been right. Now that I’m doing it I constantly get eaten by the huge mouth of such a big story. I forget details of the plot, what colour eyes this seductive character has, what was in that box at the beginning, whether I said a specific thing before and I’m repeating myself. It’s almost impossible to go back and check because I’m writing it longhand to avoid looking at what I’ve written, getting desperate that it sounds bad and be engulfed by desolation.

It’s confounding because I have so much space to say so many things and I don’t know how to say them, but also because the vastness is pleasing and beckoning. It whispers to me about all the places I can explore and all the people I can slip inside of. It titillates me with all the possible fantasies on the cusp of coming alive and chills me with dread whenever I allow myself to consider too hard what I’m doing. I keep telling myself that I write because I can’t live without it and nothing else needs to come out of it and yet there’s an urgency that weighs on me.

But because my body is in a better place I can start exercising, which is a peak I’m attempting to conquer, just as this book is. The two in tandem work a bit better than just one solitary exertion. They get infusions of energy from one another. Plus exercising thrills me with the thought of one day being strong and able to lift heavy.

I’ll go back to exercising my writing muscles. I hope you enjoy the colours of today’s hallucination.

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A comingling of shapes and colours. I’m a glutton for colours and want to use them all at the same time. Why choose a palette when you can squeeze everything in?

If the universe plays, which I’m sure it does, this is what it could look like, one of the infinite instances of chance, meeting, experimentation.

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On an M class planet far, far away, the ocean is spring green, the currents, satured with some nutrient foreign to us, are many hues of red. Life deep down, under tremendous pressure, exhibits the slickest flexibility, agility and grace we’ve ever seen. We’re drawn to its hypnotic motion and must make sure we don’t unfasten our seatbelts, break open the doors of our exploration vehicle to jump into the thick liquid, throbbing with vital desire. It calls to us and calls to us. We’ve numbed ourselves with pills that take away our joy. It’s the only way to resist. We tell each other of the others who’ve taken off their diving suits to embrace the colours of the deep and were devoured. On their faces, rapture. We don’t mention that. We stay away from the high we glimpsed in their eyes.

“You’re so beautiful, so juicy, so brimful of foreign information,” the ocean tells us. “Let’s embrace, just once, and then I’ll let you go more wondrous than you’ve ever been or could’ve ever dreamt.”

We can almost imagine the multitude of shapes we might become, the infinitely more varied senses, their life spent in bursts of bliss.

“Don’t deprive yourselves,” the ocean says.

We’re in love with the ocean. The ocean is the only person that has seen us the way we want to be seen, to the bottom of our discontents. The ocean has scraped the walls of all our unhappiness and has understood. Only the ocean knows how beautiful we could be. We ache for the ocean the way we ached for the lush geography of a boy’s wiry and hard body when hunger first exploded into us, for the hedonic promise of discovering that special girl’s form, the ocean has neverending intimacies to share with us. The ocean is the perfect lover, the only partner we need. The ocean and only the ocean can give us what we’ve never dared to ask or even dream of.

“You can leave me,” the ocean says, “but I can never leave you.”

Numbed as we are we ascend once our instruments have appraised the miracle of the ocean. But the ocean has marked us as its own like no one ever has. The ocean has us and we’ve surrendered, in that secret place inside our minds where no one ever goes. The ocean knows we’ll come back to receive what we’ve been promised.

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Me trying to draw bubbles and things in those bubbles. I think the weird ducks are the best, though. They were unexpected, like all the details that suprise me with their beauty. If I try to create a specific effect I usually fail, but then something else pops up and catches me unprepared. Sometimes I can recreate it, sometimes I can’t. All the time I’m elated at the discovery.

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The construction site in our apartment is both a cause of frustration because I can’t focus on writing and other creative delights, but it’s also become one way I can feel my body in celebratory ways. I’m puzzled by this urge of constantly investigating it in its ways of sensing and existing considering how often it makes itself known to me in its distress. Yet when I’m in a state of balance, always precarious, I’m wont to take a crowbar, a hammer and some really sturdy screwdrivers and start taking out the hardwood floor. I don’t only start but keep going until my body aches and weakens, breath comes heavy and I insist, force my muscles to move through the ache because my goals are lofty. I made a plan to finish and I won’t let myself rest until I do. The next day I’ll barely be able to move, my muscles bruised and battered, full of the micro-tears that make them grow. I rejoice in the prospect because this physical dimension of me has been pushed to an edge that I chose. I don’t enjoy the pain, but I revel in being able to bear it.

The little greenhouse of our unfinished balcony is quickly filling up with unusual suculents. I imagined we’d hold off until it’s almost finished, we’d exercise restraint, but our aging bodies hide children with non-existent impulse control. My husband would go shopping and see some pretty cacti and send me a picture. At first I’d be reluctant, no more plant children for a while, I’d say, but then I’d relent because I’ve already fallen in love with all their tiny spiky heads, their vegetal fullness, their unexpected shapes. As a child I had a book of cacti that I absolutely loved. My husband, the old book whisperer, has found a copy in some recess of the internet. Unfortunately, it’s in one of the boxes that serve as the base of our bedroom and living room beds. I have no idea when I’ll see it again, I’m just hopeful it won’t be forever till I do. This book, different than the others, half album, half manual could keep me riveted for hours. I’d seen a cactus or two by that time but nothing that could compare to the abundance of form the book showed me. It’s probably why I love them so much now.

During the day, set on a task, I stop to say hello to the plant children, I inspect them, their detail endless and irresistible and forget to leave and complete my task. I’m not mad about it, there are worse things than to be the captive of your house plants. A nature documentary I once watched advanced the seemingly preposterous premise that maybe plants have been growing us to help them survive rather then the other way around and I find it makes sense. We’re easily influenced, we not only like the sweetness of their fruit, but are attracted by the beauty of flowers, humans, a surrealist mash-up between bears and bees. Because our interest in the vegetal world is multitateral, sustenance, protection, beauty, mythology and meaning-making, the greenery of the world does appear to be a sort of progenitor where we go to get all of these necessary ingredients for life.

February started on a weekend so I went to see my friend in a nearby city. I say nearby, but it’s three hours away by train. It feels close though, an arm’s lenght away. All places become closer once it’s subjectively easy to get there, I suppose. This trip is both cheap and simple. I get on the train, three hours, half a book and some music later, I’m there.

This time I went with on earlier train so I can admire the scenery and of course to get more time with my friend. The ride, although too full of people, a detail that usually makes me uncomfortable because it impinges on my personal space, encased me in a bubble of delectation. The playlist I’d chosen erased the griminess of the experience with the clear, soulful notes of Dom La Nena. I’ve always enjoyed the peacefulness of train rides, that space in which you’re not supposed to to anything but look out the window and daydream. It instantly releases me from the many demands I have of myself, I become softer, I let go of the numerous folds of my being and flop contentedly. It sounds as if I were a piece of cloth. Maybe that’s all I am, a mix between an infinitely layered dress crossed with overalls; the practicality of pants and the glamour of a voluminous gown. Between the layers of fabric hides a copious amount of pockets, such a plenty that I often forget I have some of them and their contents, only to be ambushed by the discovery and the recognition at random moments.

The monotony of a flat landscape never bothered me, but it’s also never incensed me with its elegance. I don’t know if it’s because I’m so immersed in drawing and painting and mixing colours at the moment that I finally saw it or some other obscure internal process played its part, but the infinity of tones of the wintery palette struck me dumb with admiration; straw-yellows, browns and blacks made complex by the addition of other intruding tints, the bright and deep red bark of the overgrown shoots of bushes brushing the side of the train, the luminous, saturated yellow lichen on the trunks of juvenile trees crowded together in a tangle of thin branches, the neon variations of moss on naked trees along the river.

At my friend’s, her male dog, an animal bigger than me, a gentle beast, has taken to imitating the cockerels in the yard. Every time they sing, at 4 in the morning or in the middle of the day, he produces a deep, gutural yowl in response that is somewhat similar. I found it the most endearing, heart-warming quirk. Is he trying to communicate with them, does he find it fun to immitate that sound, is it a competition, is he trying to best them? Knowing that animals can be taught to express themselves in our language through special buttons and that they are unbelievably complex in their expressions of the lived experience (compared to how little we, humans, think of them compared to us), with opinions about what they want, or dislike, things that are happening, have happened and will happen (the fact that they understand time is a astonishing in itself), I’ll always harbour a curiosity about this dog’s motivations.

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Vacations are good for my mental health! I have to make this sentence into a poster. I hope I never need to work without stopping for 2 years like I’ve done until this December.

The three weeks I took away from everything and everyone were a long hallucination, to be honest. I had a list of things it would’ve been good to finish and then I did none of them.

In a stroke of luck I realised in the middle of the second season of the expanse that it was an adaptation. When I’d finally started to like it. I’d been watching something while drawing, background noise as it were. I checked and saw they only adapted the first six books. I proceeded to get the whole series in audiobook form and then the hallucination began.

They were so intense and entertaining I couldn’t stop. The guilt in the background kept extending an icy finger to poke me from time to time because I wasn’t doing all the other useful activities I thought I should be doing, but I slapped it away. I drew and I listened and thought about building worlds and characters and how when you find a recipe that works you can keep repeating it without fear of failure. Series usually drop in quality after the first few books, but these ones were on point from the first to the last. I can’t describe the delight they gave me. I bought new brushes and painted very badly, I bought more pencils to add to my collection and tried each one, I bought more Dixit, because I need to have all the pretty cards, I made cakes and ate them, I scraped walls, all while listening to the Expanse.

The books also seemed to function as a mental break. I didn’t realise this until I started work again and found it easier. Time went by fast, the repetition and the mundanity of it all were reassuring instead of jarring.

I don’t make resolutions, the new year doesn’t function as a new beginning. I’d made that mistake before and regretted it. I didn’t start a new hopeful chapter, I didn’t exit a bubble only to float into another. The continuity of time makes more sense for me, a number has changed at the end of the year, but days continue to line up one after the other, each one an opportunity for joy. I can’t make them joyful all the time, but I try and the trying is all there is.

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Last week, my first week of vacation was so full of me trying to do many, many things, all the things, that I really didn’t do much. That actually means I did a lot, but there’s just so much that I want to work on, plus a backlog from the last two months when I could only do the bare minimum.

When my health sneaks up on me I always go through a period of grief. Getting into a rhythm is hard as it is without it being constantly interrupted by periods of intense weakness when I’m barely able to work, let alone, put energy into my many, many projects. Every day I don’t advance is a lost day, one I can’t help but blame myself for, although I shouldn’t. Then, once I start feeling functional I’m forced to make the effort of finding that rhythm again. Each and every time is different. I don’t start from the same point, I need to unlearn the outline of the previous routine because it can’t be implemented exactly the same and find a new way of cramming my interests into the day, the week, the month. A fresh learning curve appears. So, now, because I have some free time I went on a frenzy of doing everything all at once. And that doesn’t work.

But one incredibly satisfying change has been a bit of order on my overstuffed shelves. I saw a tin bread box with a lid and hinges in a store and kept thinking about until I bought it and re-housed the contents of a few other smaller boxes. This led to the reshuffling of a number of other items. A bout of furious reorganizing always makes me happy. My shelves aren’t instagram worthy because there’s too much stuff in them, but I prefer them this way. The small and medium canvases for painting, the boxes of coloured pencils, notebooks of a million different kinds, books about the gothic, about local flora, English grammar tomes, repurposed boxes of story cubes for my work with people, old newspapers, hair clips attached to the sides of shelves, paper for my drawings, folders of useful info I’d gathered over the years, my grandma’s wooden box, an object I’ve always loved, a small, rectangular, red speaker, a book about local folk tales, a phone stand in the shape of a chair from Ikea, all have a place. A multitude of objects you love doesn’t make for a magazine cover aesthetic, but it amounts to so much delight. Whenever I look at them giddiness grips me and sparkles inside me. Each one of these items transforms into joy of various sizes and shapes.

I realise, now that I’m here, writing, that my head doesn’t hurt that much, or I don’t pay attention to it enough to allow it to fade, which is the same, really. The pressure of all I have to do has become distant, I’m content. I should write more to keep everything else at bay.

This is one crucial element I want to incorporate into the next year. Chipping away at whatever I’m doing, half an hour at a time. That’s more than nothing and it adds up. It’s imperios I let go of the desire to accomplish a lot in a little time, and do a tiny bit more often.

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A bit of hallucinating this week because it was still very hard physically, after a recent crash, the noise level was insane on some days and I just can’t stand work anymore. All I want is a two year vacation.

But lacking that I spend the evenings indulging in little drawing workshops I bought from Domestika on a whim. I’m going to have sparks of delights throughout the three-week break I’m taking for the holidays. On top of that I’ve been thinking about how to combine drawing and books and hopefully there’ll be time for that then. Some research tomes await as well. It’s already a list and I told myself no more lists. Plan to do nothing! (said to self) That’s when you actually manage to feel satisfied. Bad habits have a way of sticking to you, well, me, in this case.

Yesterday I discovered Andrea Serio and Giordano Berti’s work for Dante’s Tarot and I’ve been thinking about the smoothness of the colour and line since. It’s some of the most beautiful thing I’ve seen and something to aspire to. Maybe one day my line will glide like that too. On a whim I looked at some Turner paintings and they took my breath away. I’m baffled by how emotion explodes in the hands of the masters. Great art is such a mystery, great writing, painting, music blends some sort of material unknown to mere mortals to let us glimpse an essential but unnameable truth. I’m blundering in search of this magnificent substance.

I could have posted an article, but I’ll leave you to contemplate weird shapes.