Have you ever had surgery? This is my ninth, if you do count wisdom teeth but don’t count all the times I went under anesthesia for IVF and fertility related procedures, plus GI scopes, which would bump me up to…23? Sigh. Let’s call it nine.

Send good vibes and (real) pictures of animals! Extra points for rabbits/hares.

(Extra) Softies will receive a 5x7 print and zine in the mail. If you aren’t a paid subscriber but are feeling these birds, download a free/pay-what-you-can PDF version here, or get the sticker and the physical zine. OR, if you’re a big fan of pigeons and emotional support (who isn’t??), this is for you.

feed the pigeons!

How have you been taking care of yourself these days? Do you see pigeons on the regular where you live? I moved to the suburbs, so I don’t see them as often anymore, but I get a lot of mourning doves, which are close enough, I guess.

Once a braggart, as Sylvia would say,
thundering in my chest, my throat, my head,
as my running feet struck ground.

Quieter these days. Wishing for steadiness. Finding it
hard to find.

How’s my heart? Full
of microplastics, apparently. Like a frightened
sea anemone. Like a goldfish
circling a drain. At risk of elongated QT intervals. Pumping twice as hard
to move half as much blood, but
pumping, all the same.

How’s my heart? Like a llama,
guarding a flock of sheep. Like a leaf
that refuses the autumn wind. Like a hawk
tracing lazy circles in a sunny sky. Like a cactus
after a long rain.

My heart, a dream that feels more real than the waking world. A houseplant too far from the window. A garbage patch in the middle of the ocean. A cat in a paper bag.

Have you ever seen a crumbling statue? Or an old stone wall? Covered in cracks and mosses, lichen-spangled, solid and soft at the same time.

“How’s your heart?” my friend didn’t ask.

And I said, “I try not to think about it too much,” which feels like nothing less than a goddamn shame.

Once the misunderstanding was sorted the conversation moved on, but my heart remained. Like a child with their hand up. Like the ghosts of everyone I’ve lost. Like an insect crawling up my pants leg, humble-bragging on the way.

I am, Sylvia’s heart said.

Still here, mine replies.

So… how’s your heart?

1. I’ve been trying to write about March and spring and life for the past couple of weeks, but the threads won’t come together. I hate this. I want for things to make sense. Seasons, feelings, people. And sometimes they do. Right now, they don’t. Not to me, anyway.

2. One thing I’ve been trying to write about is how this isn’t really spring, yet. Vonnegut called it Unlocking Season, but to me it feels more like Birthing. It’s messy, exhausting, and painful. But also hopeful. Joyful. Miraculous.

3. Another thing is this quote from Suleika Jaouad. Well, not a quote, exactly—a word. In her memoir Between Two Kingdoms, she names her goal while experiencing cancer treatment ONGOINGNESS, not survival.

4. I have thought of the last two months—the last five or so years, honestly—as surviving. I’ve wanted more, of course I have, with an ache so broad and deep it sometimes eclipses everything else. And yet the limits of my body have continued to draw in closer, tighter.

5. I can’t live like this anymore, I say to my therapist, my spouse, my friends, myself. This is not living. I am thinking of limits as losses, and they are. I am forgetting that I have always struggled with what I want being different than what I have, because that’s part of being human. I feel like I’ve said all this a hundred times. I know I’ll say it a thousand times more. I know I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to re-learn this lesson, trying to remember that it’s turtles of acceptance all the way down.

6. I think about being, instead of doing. I think about ongoing instead of surviving. I think about something Jaouad said more recently, about the migration of monarch butterflies: “No single butterfly lives long enough to complete the round-trip journey. It takes generations to finish what the first one begins.” I think about my butterfly self, how I am only one infinitesimal part of an infinite whole.

7. For the first time in a long time, it feels a little easier to breathe.

8. I almost forgot to tell you about the sandhill cranes. For two days the sky was full of them, huge swoops that crashed together and came apart. They sparkled in the sun like schools of fish.

9. Oh, and the cairns. I spent a week or so filling my journal with them. I was feeling so lost, still just trying to survive, and it was all I could do. I thought of it as marking a path for myself. Then my mom reminded me that cairns are also burial markers, and I thought “Ok. That, too.”

10. Because it’s all tangled up in death, isn’t it? The flowers that grow out of the rotting leaves. The baby birds that will fall (or be pushed) from nests. The pile of squirrel fur I find underneath a stack of logs.

11. Lately I’ve been thinking: what if I change the way I sit? The way I breathe? The way I walk up stairs? What if I drink more water? What if I eat more greens? What if I try this new medication that worked for someone else? What if I try this old medication that didn’t work for me again? These questions are less frightening than the others. What if it isn’t something I’m doing or not doing? What if it’s nothing? What if it’s everything? What if it just is? And, scariest of all: what if it keeps getting worse?

12. See above re: death.

13. See above re: turtles of acceptance.

14. I’m having another surgery soon. There’s a good chance it will improve some of my symptoms. But of course, there’s also a chance it won’t. The things we can’t change take as long as they take. I will be away from home for a while. Unless they come early, I will miss the leaves unfurling, stretching out into the sunshine, ready once again to nourish the trees.

15. But they will be here when I return. Ongoing. Fervently greening. Waving me home.

***

How are your threads lately? Are they coming together, or twisting loose in the Birthing Season wind? Either way, let’s go on being—okay?

This is critical for folks living with chronic illness, and it’s hard as fuck (for me, anyway). I’m tempted to say more, but that kind of defeats the whole point, doesn’t it? What mode are you in these days? Do you find it as difficult as I do to flip the switch?

What have you been up to? I hope you’re feeling more butterfly than goo, but if you aren’t, we can wait for literal and metaphorical spring together. I have plenty of rocks for us all.

Yes. Yes I did.

Did I make a PDF version that you can download and print at home for FREE?

Sí tambien.

Please send it to everyone you know and love.

Love wins.

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If you’re a Supporting subscriber, I’ll send it to you for $1.

If you aren’t interested in a paid sub, but still want to read this newsletter/zine, I will mail you this week’s post (and maybe something Extra?) for $5.

Or, if you want a free copy, let’s trade! Do you have a zine? A real-life newsletter? I will also accept a handwritten letter about a memorable wildlife encounter. Message me. LET’S DO THIS.

This quarter’s four-page newsletter includes the origin story of the (Extra) Soft rabbit, some drawings of a rabbit I know IRL, several book recommendations, and some metaphorical takes on winter from Tove Jansson to get you through the rest of the season.

Whether or not you read it, I hope you know that you are air and wind, made of the same stuff as the blizzard itself, and very near the moment of acceptance that is the birth of the long spring.

Substack has warned me that this post may be too long for email, so if it get cuts off, please finish reading on the site!

If you are lonely right now, for any reason, I hope you call out to some folks and get some honks in return. And if you’d like a physical reminder that you have a flock, this comic is available as a zine!

Speaking of zines, my comic Note to Self was just published in Tired A.F., an extremely rad collection of chronic illness comics, which you can download for free, edited by and printed by Crucial Comix. Thank you Crucial and Zareen!

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Margaret Atwood, excerpt from Paper Boat

Even though it may not feel like it, even when we don’t see them, the buds are there. Waiting.

Hello. I am not doing great. Perhaps you are not doing great, either? I think some of the reasons we aren’t doing great are probably the same, and involve the world spinning out of control, while the people who cause misery and pain and death run wild and unchecked. Maybe your body is also enflamed and exhausted, screaming and aching for rest, not behaving the way you want it to, not at all. Maybe someone you love has died. Maybe your romantic relationship is breaking apart, or your kid is struggling in school. Maybe your friendships are sputtering, or a job you once loved has turned sour, but this is America, land of the nothing-is-free (least of all healthcare), so you can’t leave. Maybe your parents are getting older, and they don’t want your help. Or maybe they need more help than you can give. These are all things I’ve heard from people lately (and/or experienced myself), and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. The ways that living causes suffering are too many to list (but I bet the German language has some very specific words for a lot of them).

The funny thing is that I made this comic about a week and a half ago, before I ran headlong into my semiannual crash. Even funnier (I guess?) is that I felt this way when things were going “well.” The truth is, sometimes I’m barely hanging on. Other times, my grip is stronger—but I’m never not dangling.

Thankfully, I think I’ve reached a stage in life where most times I’m asked this question, it’s by people who truly want to know the answer. Everything is hard and heartbreaking right now, and most of us don’t want to pretend otherwise. We recognize that pretending does nothing to honor the hardships we’re all facing, or to breakdown the systems causing those hardships. Telling the truth about where we’re at and what we’re carrying is an act of resistance. Maybe the only one some of us (me) can manage right now.

So, to all my ice creams cones on the left: I see you. I feel you. I’m here for you. Let’s melt (down) together. And for those ice cream cones on the right? I don’t understand you, but I wish you well. Hopefully next time you ask me this question, I’ll tell you the truth, and my answer will open the door for you a crack. Hopefully it will let in enough air for you to take a deep breath, and make some space for you to be where you really are.

So, Real Question: How are you?

The change of the calendar hit me hard. Another year had gone by with my health not only not improving, but getting worse. I was, as I saw it, even further from reclaiming the life I once had. I was devastated. I felt literally and metaphorically alone. And so I did what I always do when things finally get so bad I can no longer pretend they don’t exist: I wrote about it.

I’m not going to lie: there was an ulterior motive for posting that essay, and every essay that’s come since. Back in 2006, two years after my brother died, when I didn’t think I could possibly continue to live with the grief, I started writing about it. And it took a long time—five or six years, maybe?—but it got better. I got better. I wrote my way through. Back in 2011, when I had my first EDS flare, I started a blog. I also sent mass email updates to family and friends. And it took a while—only two or three years, this time—but it got better. I got better.

So, last January, I wrote what I consider to be my first post on (Extra) Soft Animal (I’m not sure my Substack even had a name when I wrote the other two). I harbored only some minor delusions that this act might trigger a miracle, that I’d be running 5ks and working full-time by the end of the year, but after the previous rodeos I knew that no matter the outcome, I was backed into a small, dark corner—I’d run out of oxygen, and words were the only way out I knew. Jessica Slice wrote that “allowing for coexisting occasions of goodness can be like knots on a rope that allow you to climb out of despair.” My rope is weaved out of words, and there must be rope before there can be knots.

Last year I made a rope (I tied a lot of knots, too!), and I’m so proud of all the work I did. The writing and art, yes, but also the shifting of perspective, the acceptance, the care I’ve shown my body and my heart.

Yes, I’m proud. But I’m also scared.

Let me back up.

Every year for the past seven years, I’ve started January with Julia Rothman’s More/Less exercise. Last year, after I’d recovered enough from travel/covid, I sat down and made a list. I pinned it up on my corkboard, right over my computer screen, so I’d see it every day. And honestly, I did a great job on my meager goals. I watched tons of women’s basketball. I read over a hundred books (graphic novels and audiobooks count. Fight me.). I added flowers to the prairie. I made my spouse hang pictures (sorry, hun). I even learned Wingspan (on December 31^st!).

Art and writing weren’t even on the list, yet somehow everything I created last year felt tied to that piece of paper hanging over my desk. So when I sat down a few days ago in front of a blank notebook page, I panicked a little.

Intentions can be good, necessary even, especially when you’re trying to climb out of despair.

Intentions are desires, wishes, wanting. Intentions are hopeful. What I’m really hoping for is another year of writing, drawing, collaging. Trusting myself and taking creative risks. Finding a deeper peace within my body and within my life.

But what if I write it down and it doesn’t happen? What if I don’t write it down and it doesn’t happen?

Pema Chodron says “hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there is one, there is always the other.” She goes on to say that this combination feeling, this hope/fear, is the root of our pain. “[A]bandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”

Look, I love Pema, but even if it’s good for me, I don’t want to abandon hope. I like hope, even with its sticky little underside of fear. Maybe, though, I can try to release it. To let it go, the way you’d let go of a firefly after holding your cupped hands to your eye to see it glow.

It’s so easy, this time of year, to get caught up in expectations. It’s hard to break with traditions, even if you’re the kind of person who fundamentally disagrees with New Year’s as a concept. Who thinks that the calendar really only makes sense for bureaucratic reasons, and that if we’re going to insist on celebrating a new year it should be on the vernal equinox, as it was until very recently, and that any celebration should involve ways to be kind to ourselves and our planet, instead of self-deprivation and judgement.

Not that Julia’s exercise is either of those things. It isn’t. I could absolutely make a list that reads More Acceptance, More Gentleness, More Slowness, More Stillness. But I think what I really want is to be where I am, and be open to whatever comes next. Not this year, but this season. Because while the years march forward, the seasons trace a circle. They connect, they overlap, they spiral. I would like to let them continue to birth me and bury me. I would like to stop trying to cram them into calendar squares. I would like to hold hope and fear gently, to watch them flare, see them for what they are, and let them go.

Who knows, maybe next week I’ll feel differently about all of this. Maybe I’ll fill the page with watercolor snails, or pigeons, or something I haven’t even thought of, yet. Maybe I’ll re-evaluate on March 20^th, when the first shoots of green push up through the frozen ground. But for now, 2026 is blank. And for today, at least, it’s going to stay that way.

What about you? Are there any unmet goals from last year that you’ve removed the time limit on? Have you let go of any traditions this year? Are you ready to abandon hope? Or just the concept of time as linear? Wherever you’re at, I hope you’re staying warm and noticing birds.

As always, if this piece spoke to you, please consider liking, sharing, commenting, and/or subscribing! It makes the void I’m shouting into feel a lot less void-y.

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The trend in my algorithm this week is folks talking about how January is a terrible time to push yourself to do anything new/unnecessary, and I’m co-signing (and selfishly hoping this is a global shift toward rescheduling, or at least re-branding, New Year’s). I’m working on a longer piece about that, but in the meantime I’d like to share this little comic for anyone else who is stumbling into 2026 like a newborn fawn: shaky, tentative, and in need of somewhere warm and safe to rest.

Not to brag, but I’ve already gotten bingo several different directions, and plan to do so daily until at least April. Maybe by then I’ll be able to ditch the socks, at least?

Until then, I’ve made a blank version that you can download for free here and customize with your own favorite cozy activities (or non-activities, as it were). If I’d had the energy to make a second card, I would have included:

• simmer pots

• leaving holiday decorations up

• naps

• sweatpants (obvs)

• crafting

• tea

• hot baths/saunas

What else would you add?

Hope you made it through the holidays okay and are getting your new year’s legs under you. May your January be restful and restorative. As always, if this post spoke to you, please consider liking, commenting, sharing, or subscribing!

Last week’s prompt over at was to make a comic of your year. The first step was to make a list of things that happened to you this year, and I sort of froze, because I wasn’t sure that anything had happened to me. Not by typical standards, anyway. I hadn’t traveled anywhere (except for a day trips to Indianapolis and Milwaukee to see doctors). I hadn’t moved or had a baby, gotten divorced or married, learned a new skill or adopted a new pet. I hadn’t even befriended a crow, which was my number one goal for the year and I assume only involves going to the same park a few times with a handful of peanuts.

I decided the phrasing was what was getting to me. There’s not much opportunity for things to happen to you when the only time you leave your house is to drop off/pick up your kids from school.

So instead, I tried to think about what I’d done. The answer was still nothing much. I’d canceled lots of trips and gatherings and restaurant reservations. Got a refund for a lovely looking botanical illustration class someone gifted me that I didn’t have the energy to take. I’d scaled back on socializing, activities for my kids. I’d whittled away every possible unnecessary demand. It was a year of letting go.

And that was it: it was a year of letting go.

I let go of my expectations that I would someday get “better.” I let go of pointless efforts to change the way my body felt and functioned. My brief Midwest medical tour notwithstanding, I cut way back on doctor’s appointments and scans and tests. I quit doing hours of exercises and stretches that were only making my symptoms worse.

It was a year of acceptance. A year of grief.

And it was also a year of sharing that acceptance and grief. Of writing and making art about what was happening to me.

Once upon a time, a thousand years ago, I wrote about my life exclusively. I mostly stopped after my kids were born. Suddenly, everything I said or did impacted them, too. Especially when they were little, the lines between our lives felt very blurred. So much—maybe all of—what was happening to me then was about becoming a parent, how it rearranged my body, my sense of self, my past and my future. I was burned out after years of sharing my hardest, most vulnerable truths. I was split open raw in a way I’d never been before. I decided I wanted to keep my life to myself, for a while. Even after my kids were older, and my body started to fall apart, I still didn’t want to tell that story. Because I wasn’t ready to believe that story.

But this year, I was. I am. And telling some of that story through polaroid pictures and comics and collages and terrible poems is saving me.

That’s what art does. Both yours and other people’s. It saves you.

Here’s to more pictures and words in 2026. Let’s keep saving ourselves and each other, ok?

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The Out-of-network Network

Tired Mom

The summer after my second kid turned one, I got shingles. It started with the worst headache of my life, then the tell-tale rash erupted across the right side of my ribcage. I went to urgent care and got a prescription for antivirals. I assumed that would be the end of it…

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5 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Ian Goldstein, Amanda Lehr, and Kelley Clink (they/she)

Every day, around midday, I sit on my back deck and say hello to the trees. This month I’ve been looking and listening for the sandhill cranes as they make their way south, but I haven’t had any luck. Maybe they take a different route in the fall. Come to think of it, I’ve only seen one flock of migrating geese so far this season, and by the time I grabbed my phone to take a picture, they were gone.

People all around Chicago have been seeing the Northern Lights again. And once again, I have not. I can’t stay up late enough, don’t have the energy to drive into the darker areas outside the city. I’m in bed by 8:30. Asleep by 9. My sanity depends on this ritual. Right now, the miracle of 9 hours of consecutive sleep is enough.

The trees are releasing their leaves, the plants have gone to seed. Kurt Vonnegut called this space between peak leaf color and full-on winter “locking season”:

The poetry of four seasons is all wrong for this part of the planet, and this may explain why we are so depressed so much of the time. I mean, spring doesn’t feel like spring a lot of the time, and November is all wrong for autumn1, and so on.

Here is the truth about the seasons: Spring is May and June. What could be springier than May and June? Summer is July and August. Really hot, right? Autumn is September and October. See the pumpkins? Smell those burning leaves? Next comes the season called Locking. November and December aren’t winter. They’re Locking. Next comes winter, January and February. Boy! Are they ever cold!

What comes next? Not spring. ‘Unlocking’ comes next. What else could cruel March and only slightly less cruel April be? March and April are not spring. They’re Unlocking.

I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of six seasons as opposed to four. But I’d propose we rename this one Goodbye, because like it or not, this is the season of letting go.

Leaves, flowers, sunshine. Mosquitos, tree frogs, bees. Migrating birds, shorts, celestial particle collisions.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, all this letting go, but it is hard. Humans love leaves and flowers and sunshine. I think most of us love tree frogs. I love bees. (No one likes mosquitoes. I don’t even know why I included them). We know, rationally, that the sun will come back. The leaves and the flowers and the birds will return. What we don’t know is whether we’ll be around to see it. We don’t like to think about that kind of goodbye, but it’s there, too, tangled up in all the sticks and bare branches. I’m trying to make space for it this year. It’s heavy, as so many things are these days. I let it spread out a little, take up some of the space left by the tree frogs, so it can breathe. Hello, big feelings. Hello tenderness. Hello fear.

Hello, Goodbye season. Celebration of impermanence. Opportunity to practice letting go. You will leave someday, too, which reminds me that everything, every single thing, ends. Which also might mean that nothing ever really ends at all.

Some Good Things

Robert Emmons, a gratitude researcher, says that gratitude is “an affirmation of goodness.” Well lucky us! We’ve been sharing good things this whole year. I suppose one really big thing to be grateful for is that piece of Margaret Atwood’s poem, which I first saw on Instagram, which is completely lifted out of context, which I’ve been using for my own selfish purpose of finding good in my life and in the world. THANK YOU MARGARET! Your words are Good.

• So many people traded me for zines! What a joy to receive all your gorgeous, hilarious art and words in the mail, on actual paper. Here’s the roundup:

Clockwise from top left corner:

“Going Gluten Free” and “Directions to the End of the World,” by . More of her work here!

“How to Make a Zine” and “I Am Not a Brand. I Am Human.” by . Art, zines, books, and more right here!

“The Glue Baby Gazette,” by , the Commonplace Zine Queen (my title, but well deserved). Check out more of her work here!

A gorgeous painting/collage/print by the artist Jill Nahrstedt, who wrote me a note about fall on the back.

“Penpocalypse,” “The Oddscope, Summer 2025,” and “Aloe Gerald,” by . These speculative flash zines made me laugh out loud. Read more from Maggie here!

• My kids, my spouse, and my mom helped me wash and fill my bird feeders, and the finches, chickadees, and nuthatches are back. I look forward to spending the winter with the birds who stick around. Looking at you, juncos.

• I didn’t write a Good Things for October, so I didn’t get to share with you my absolutely epic Halloween costume. Please enjoy me dressed as the superhero I would actually be if I were a superhero.

• SWEATPANTS.

• saving the best for last: I’m still here. Still clinging to this spinning hunk of rock in space. Still drawing and collaging and writing and photographing. Still sharing my weird with the world. There are a lot of bits about my life that are hard, but damn, goddamn, I am lucky and grateful for every day I’m alive.

I hope all of you spent a decent chunk of time last week with good food, loving family and friends, and comfortable pants. I’m deeply grateful to all of you for making me feel less alone in the world. (Also, make sure you tell your kids the true story of Thanksgiving.)

Once upon a time there was a woman-type person who found herself in middle age. She had always considered herself to be kind of on top of things. Sort of. Mostly. Actually, now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure. Had she always been this scattered? This forgetful? This tired? She was having a hard time remembering. Her mind felt heavy, lumbering and slow. Her body did, too.

Oh girl, same, the other moms said. Between the pandemic, the children, the perimenopause, the state of the world. But they were still doing Pilates and working their jobs and getting their kids to enrichment activities. They could still drink coffee, and wine, and eat chocolate. The woman-type person found herself increasingly unable to tolerate much more than blueberries and salmon. So healthy! the other moms said. I wish I had your willpower. She felt an overwhelming urge to rake her nails across their faces.

Her doctor suggested hormone therapy. Light therapy. Therapy-therapy. But she was already doing all that and more. She found herself drifting off in conversations. Staring silently, blankly, after someone asked a question. Words were leaving her, she thought. Feelings, though, were still there. Anger, jealousy, frustration, longing, love. If anything, the feelings were louder, sharper than they’d ever been. It bothered her, at first, not to be able to wrap all those feelings up in words. I don’t think I know how to be a human, anymore, she told her spouse. Nobody does, he said. Thankfully, eventually, she ran out of the energy to care.

She took to her bed at the end of November, one of those afternoons when the sun set during school pickup and midnight-dark coated the windows before dinner. When her children tried to wake her, she growled. After that, her spouse directed the kids to steer clear of the bedroom. All through the winter, he made their breakfasts and lunches and took them to school. All through the winter, the thick hair that had always covered the woman’s legs grew thicker, spread onto her torso and down her arms. The wood of the bed frame groaned beneath her gathering weight. She dreamed of clear streams and damp earth. The smell of pine and cedar, the crunch of needles and leaves under her bare feet.

When she awoke in the spring she was ravenous. She stumbled down the stairs. Her family had piled the table with blueberries and salmon, and she devoured it all. At first the children flinched when she pulled them to her, but she was careful with her claws, and the pads of her paws were soft. She breathed in the sweet tang of their scalps and felt her heart stretch open. The children laughed—her breath, so much stronger now, so much warmer, tickled. She got down on the floor and let them crawl onto her back, which was broader and stronger than it had ever been. They clutched fistfuls of her fur, but it didn’t hurt. For the first time in years, nothing hurt. She craned her giant head backward and licked the children’s faces.

She couldn’t make their breakfasts or lunches, but she carried them to school: dangling by the backs of their jackets in her mouth when they were younger, riding on her back once they’d grown. She didn’t understand their words, but she knew when they were scared or sad, and she nuzzled their salty tears, held them close to her wooly chest until they fell asleep. She couldn’t help them with homework, or drive them to sports practices, but she could roar on the sidelines, and sit beside them while they worked, her huge heart beating love love love.

In the beginning she wondered if a day would come when no one would need her anymore. She longed for it sometimes, back then, her mouth clamped on the collars of tiny coats. She imagined finally loping off into the forest, alone. She still dreamed of the forest; a place of soft moss and warm meat. A place she had never been. A place she knew, now, that she would never go. Because even when her children left and started lives of their own, even if her spouse moved away, or fell in love with a human, or died, her soft animal body belonged with the people she loved. The people she needed. Just as much as, if not more than, anyone needed her. It was a relief to keep her body near them all. It was a relief to be, and to be loved, just as she was.

*

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m not very good at being a person. I’m starting to think, though, that it’s not so much being a person, and more being this person^[1]. My body and my life have changed so much over the past few years. I’m still trying to figure out how to be who I am now. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I were a bear.

How are you at humaning these days? Would you rather be an animal? If so, which one? Would you still be my friend if I became a bear? I don’t actually like salmon all that much, but I do eat blueberries every day.

^[1] Truthfully I’m not sure that I’ve ever been good at humaning, but before I was disabled I sure was good at pretending.

An Offering

In early November there were sheets and towels and clothes, washed and folded and put away, then worn, and washed, and folded again. There were old friends and board games, parent teacher conferences and a ukulele. Books were read. Logs and candles were burned. Soup was consumed. There was a front porch offering, a prayer, a welcoming, a howling at the full moon. Then the pumpkins collapsed. Snow fell. Ice wrinkled the edges of puddles. Birds were scarce, but there were squirrels, busy brown bodies scalloping over the branches. Branches, increasingly bare. There were humidifiers, cleansed and filled. School projects and head colds and doctor’s appointments and music lessons. Small clouds of breath in the sharp morning air. Heavy coats. Warm hats. Photographs that tried to capture the beauty of impermanence. An infinity of instants that fell outside the frame. There was a gathering, then, of available pieces. An offering, a prayer, a welcoming, a release.

A softening.

A letting go.

How’s your November so far? What do you do with the billions of life bits that fall outside the frame? Some of mine become poems, some float around in my journal, and the rest pile up in the part of my brain that could be remembering the name of that thing, you know the one, that thing that does the thing? Sigh.

Anyway, every month we meet on Zoom and sketch out a comic based on a prompt. This month’s prompt was to think about your body as a haunted house, and UNHOLY BANANAS did that ever resonate with me. Our meet up was this past Sunday, and I’d already done two sketches by then just based on the title of the prompt alone. I drew so much on Monday that I knew I was going to pay for it. Here’s the fallout:

I was planning on stopping with what you saw Tuesday, the original four panels (and the cover image that I couldn’t help drawing at the last minute). But my brain just kept. on. going. That’s the thing with ADHD. Sometimes it’s like chasing butterflies, which is it’s own kind of frustration. Dozens of colorful ideas flittering in and out of my brain, refusing to be pinned down. Other times it’s like being chained to the front of a rollercoaster. The purpose and focus of the rollercoaster episodes can be a relief after the butterfly zone, but the intensity is overwhelming, exhausting, and even a little scary. It’s a mixed bag for sure. Some treats, and a whole lotta tricks.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this. It’s just that, I don’t want you to think I was being sneaky, holding back parts of the comic as some kind of gotcha. I really wasn’t planning any of this! Not the original comic, or the back cover, or the two extra panels I drew after Tuesday so I could make this thing into an 8 page zine. I had plenty of other stuff I could have been doing, and definitely some stuff I should have been doing, but it was like I was possessed. My brain said MAKE A ZINE, and I was like okay, okay, stop hitting me! And I did it:

If you’d like a copy, you can get one here. I’m trying a thing where you pay what you can, so instead of charging through my shop, I linked to my Venmo in the object description. And, as always, I’d love to trade! If you have a zine, or want to write me a letter, or have something else in mind, let me know! You can reach me at kelleyclink@gmail.com.

If you’re like Kelley, I love you, and I want to see the extra panels, but I don’t need anything else in my recycling bin right now, rest assured: I have you covered. You can get a PDF version of the full comic here, again at a pay-what-you-can-rate. Paid subscribers at every tier should have it in their inbox already!

I plan to be back in your feeds next week with an October edition of Good Things, if my brain says it’s okay.

How’s your brain these days? Is it as bossy as mine? And as foggy? (If so, join the Chronic Illness Comics Club!) I hope no matter how your brain and body are doing, you’re coming out ahead in the treats column. And if you prefer tricks, well, I’d give you all my physical and mental unpredictability if I could!

xo,

Kell

p.s. Please enjoy these unholy bananas:

Happy Halloween to everyone who understands that when you’re chronically ill, every season is scary!