Part 1: Thriving vs. Surviving

Let's talk about the power of assigning the right words to represent thoughts and feelings. Join me for part 1 of a new zine project!

I make art for the same reason an accountant balances books: to understand how everything adds up.

Making art helps me sort through and add up my thoughts. It helps me understand what I really feel and what I really think. Making art helps me take the nebulous and complicated and turn it into something tangible and understandable. It’s how I process and move through life!

In that vein, something I’ve been struggling to articulate over the past few months is this underlying feeling that I should be thriving. (Should being a notoriously dangerous word...) My first attempt at capturing this feeling was in a few lines I typed in my phone’s notes app that ended with, “I am not thriving.”

That line rang in my ears for days. It felt good to write down something so simple and true—something that should have been obvious to me, but that I was actively avoiding. It can be difficult to be honest with yourself sometimes!

Since I lost my Dad last fall, I have been re-evaluating a lot of my life. The process of grieving and rethinking the way I want to live hasn’t exactly been a recipe for thriving. It turns out it’s hard to take good care of yourself when you’re going through difficult life-altering events.

Assigning words to these feelings was the first step in channeling them into art. I took my phone notes and worked them into this messy first draft (under the section about being sick… March was sort of a rough month in retrospect!)

Wow—what a mess! I eventually tidied my scribbles into this:

I’ve been feeling scattered lately
frayed at the edges
I feel like I should be thriving
I am not thriving
It comes as no surprise
to anyone except me
I willingly forget
my spirit is still
battered and bruised
and trying to get used
to the shape of these
new surroundings

Next I started sketching these words into an eight-page square zine format. My original intention was to keep this project small—something just substantial enough to express this particular topic and help me move on to the next thing. Here’s how I started sketching it out:

I quickly realized that eight pages wasn’t going to be enough. Everything felt too cramped. I expanded into 12 pages (plus covers, not pictured) for a total of 16. You can tap or click the image to get a closer look.

I felt like I was onto something, but it still fell short of what I wanted to communicate. I liked some of the imagery, but the overall concept felt disjointed and not fully formed. I was a little stuck, so I took a break from writing and dove into some of the imagery. I started with the exploding heart, which is today’s art print download for paid subscribers!

Drawing this heart gave me time to marinate on the concept, but it didn’t solve all my problems! Next week I’ll share how I got past my block with the words and took this zine to the next phase of development.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me to connect with you every week. In case you missed it, last week I shared a comic called “A Walk in the Rain.” You can check that out here.

Paid subscribers, please keep scrolling to download printable versions of the exploding heart illustration pictured above!