Diary Comics
The past 14 days have been full of life: the end of spring break; a friend’s beautiful Seder; a small family gathering for Easter; kindergarten Parent/Teacher conference to set goals for first grade; a trip to St Louis to celebrate my father-in-law’s 75th birthday; a trip to urgent care for my daughter (not covid or pneumonia, thank goodness, just a bad respiratory virus); solo parenting for 3 days while my husband was on a work trip; and a 5 hour doctor appointment for my medically complex daughter where we got unexpected, somewhat miraculous, good news. And now here we are, somehow the last Friday of April—shouldn’t it be warmer by now? I’m in my frigid basement studio with a knit cap on my head, a profoundly unsexy wearable blanket turning my body into a blue fleece Mr Stay Puft, a cozy Violet Beauregard, typing with stiff fingers and wiping away exhausted tears because they make my cheeks too cold.
My sister told me a few years ago that she has worked hard to stop saying “after [X date], things will get easier/back to normal,” because it truly never does. Life, at least right now, is a process of daily accumulation: more house projects, more emotionally & logistically complicated children’s needs, more gallons of milk in the grocery cart. More bills. More ambition. More demands on my time. I took my sister’s wisdom to heart and have gotten pretty good at embracing the moderate-to-hurricane-level chaos of this stage of my life—will my house ever be clean? Nope. Will my texts be consistently answered in a timely manner? Yes, but only about hot goss, otherwise YMMV depending on the day. What I’m not as well practiced in is keeping up a creative practice through the chaos, even with childcare.
I am a self-taught artist and used to carry a chip on my shoulder about it, but now I’ve been making comics for a decade (even if half of that time I was mostly spent trying to keep a series of toddlers from sprinting off the coffee table). I feel confident in my work, in what I want to say, in how I want to say it. What I don’t have is the craft-supported discipline that my work needs right now. These diary comics have been helpful to keep my hand moving, even when other work is stalled because of <insert X only-for-today life event distraction>—these are straight ink, no sketching or planning, no preciousness, no ambition to make a grand statement or deep insight. Just documenting details from my day.
I’m also trying to write every day, with less success. I’ll share more in the coming weeks about the book I’m writing, but progress has been slow. Without a strong writing-as-craft practice, my writing ritual is embarrassingly raw: I put a sleeping mask over my eyes and sit still in a chair for 20 minutes, letting my mind quiet, allowing myself to open up. Opening up has always been easy, I’m quick to be moved to tears, but recently the sheer number of things that feel urgent to think & feel & process are completely overwhelming. I get short-circuited and close down and let myself get distracted, feeling urgent about adding raspberries to my grocery list or diving deep on This Old House to figure out how we can better insulate these basement walls. It has been nice to be able to look back through this little red Moleskine and say “ah yes, things feel overwhelming because they fucking ARE,” take a deep breath, and try to get back to work.