Pivot

Greetings, dear readers! It has been a minute. The last eighteen-ish months have been a hell of a ride. I’m sure the same is true for you, too. Life can be chaotic, and communication and creativity sometimes fall by the wayside.

I was given the wonderful gift of time to do some creative play. This is something that has been missing from my life for some time.

This time last year I wasn’t even aware of the term “surface pattern design” as a career. Then more and more it started creeping up in the things that had my attention, like designers in my instagram feed. A friend mentioned what a great teacher Bonnie Christine is (and what great taste she has). I had never heard of her, either. I’ve since learned that she is basically synonymous with surface pattern design. Once I found Bonnie and had an understanding of what surface designers do, i was hooked. THIS. IS. IT. That was the secret sauce that brought together all of the things I love to do. I could make book-themed art that I could put on my own products and fabric, and license my designs to make income from it indefinitely. This was nothing short of life-changing for me.

I have since taken her Immersion course, which also happened to be the most comprehensive and easy-to-follow crash course on Illustrator that I’ve ever found. I’m very far from making it a career, but I’m also further beyond the honeymoon stage than I’ve gotten with anything other than my love for writing. I’m absolutely head over heels excited to put in the hard work and do this for a living. It has been such a bright spot in an otherwise dismal and uphill year.

So friends, I apologize for the long silence. I’m still here and I still want to engage in conversation with you wonderful people. Know that I’m still creating, and am pivoting a bit–not in a different direction, but in a way that integrates more of what matters to me. I hope you will come along with me on this journey, and I will do my best to share all the wisdom and joy I gather along the way. šŸ™‚

CRT

I had scribbled this down on scratch paper not long after George Floyd’s death. It seems like there will always be something happening in our country that makes it relevant to talk about systematic racial injustice. Maybe someday it will be history (that we are allowed to teach) rather than headlines and internet chatter. I hope. I always hope.

You protest.
You protest for your right to protest.
But to take a knee is a bridge too far.
You claim that fascism impedes your freedom.
Iā€™m sorry you canā€™t breathe with a mask on your face.
Try breathing with a knee on your neck.
Why do four white police have the right to kneel?
George.
Ahmaud.
Kaepernick.
ā€œObamagate.ā€
His only crime was his color.
I want you to say it out loud
Because your actions are killing.
Your ignorance is killing.
Your whiteness lets you claim ā€œthis is Americaā€ to let you
Get away with murder in the name of freedom.
Donā€™t you know thereā€™s a fascist knee on your neck, too?
You kneel to the god of capitalism
And insist on the right to life.
Inconvenience is not infringement.
Discomfort is not oppression.
But I guess even a pebble in your shoe is intolerable
When you were born with everything.
Born looking down, youā€™ll never know what it means to have to hope.
Itā€™s not a jackbooted foot or a knee in dress blues that holds you down,
Itā€™s a dress shoe covering bone spurs and gout.
No wonder you canā€™t see the knee on your neck.
Your vision is based on color.
Maybe one day weā€™ll learn to look to the sideā€”
To see everyone on a lateral plane.
Not up, not down,
Not worry whoā€™s right or left.
When we clamor to be on top,
Someoneā€™s always on the bottom.

Hello, dear reader.

A great deal has changed since I last posted. It seems as though a lifetime has passed. We are living in very different times than we were even a year ago.

I also now have a son. He is nearly a year and a half now. That reality amplifies everything.

As with many other things on the erstwhile to-do list, the book series I have been so excited about for quite some time has taken a back burner. It is difficult to find the mental, emotional, and physical energy to write–especially dystopian middle-grade fiction–when your heart is weighed down by the things happening in our country every day.

All the more reason it is important to keep creating.

Meanwhile, I thought I should come here to let you know that I still have every intention of writing this book series. I intend to keep making things that will hopefully be meaningful to someone, someday, on some level. I have come here to let you know that I am still here, hoping that words matter, hoping that hope matters. And I hope you are still showing up every day, too, even when things feel bleak.

I am doing my best to have faith in the goodness of people. We can’t let the darkness get the better of us. A collective tiredness is palpable, but everyone has something to contribute to the good fight in his own way. We owe it to those who came before us to fight so that their efforts were not in vain, and we owe it to our posterity to carry on a legacy of goodness.

I hope in hindsight we will feel proud of how we responded at this moment in history, however small our efforts seem. Good begets good. Light spreads. Please let this be an encouragement to not let your light grow dim.

In love,

Veronica

a note on the “d word”

Currently, I’m working against a low level of anger and frustration–most of which is directed at myself because I havenā€™t been as productive as Iā€™d hoped to be. I havenā€™t hit my stride yet. I havenā€™t been disciplined enough. When I notice that I’m directing my frustrations outward and turning into an unbearable asshole, I take a deep breath and finally recognize it as my trusty old friend: depression. Ah, Resistance at its finest.

Even though I can fake my way through an hour or two at a time, it can be hard to shake because it manifests in so many different ways. Sometimes the songbird just can’t bring itself to sing. I think I often find things to be critical of in order to protect myself, to put a shell around myself because vulnerability is hard (and there’s another reason why writing is freaking hard,Ā because it’s sharing a part of yourself and inviting rejection and criticism).

I know that pouring into other people and getting out of my own head is a way to beat depression, but the ugly thing about depression is that it makes you feel like other people canā€™t/donā€™t benefit from your existence. Something (or a variety of things) in your experience has caused you to believe that your feelings, your efforts, your presence, whatever abilities you think you have, the things you put out into the worldā€”none of it matters. You feel small. Inconsequential. Useless and unwanted.

In spite of carrying around that feeling all the time, it hurts to type it. And from the outside, to those who havenā€™t truly wrestled with actual depression, it must sound incredibly selfish. I can say with certainty that how it sounds could not be more different than how it feels. Itā€™s not hunger for approval, itā€™s a deep need for meaning. (Any fellow INFJs out there can tell you how exhausting small talk can be, as there is a longing for substance and depth and connection.) And itā€™s not circumstantial. It doesnā€™t change with your environment and you canā€™t will yourself out of it. This isn’t a defeatist attitude, itā€™s an unwillingness to take the placebo (“just shake it off and get over it”) and prolong the real problem.

I think it was Charlotte Bronte who said that “a restless mind makes a ruffled pillow.” Depression keeps your mind always wandering, which is probably why the thing a depressed person wants the most is to just sleep. It steals restful sleep, and that leads to a whole host of other problems. It’s a seemingly endless cycle. And most people will either not notice or will just think youā€™re an unpleasant person. The depressive is generally not an unhappy person. Happiness is a state of a soul content with finding a balance of virtue and pleasure in life, not circumstances or merely a feeling.Ā A melancholy exterior can misrepresent what’s going on inside. Sometimes you’re just exhausted and have to turn down some functions because you’re feelingĀ everything.

I find beauty in a lot of things and am easily moved. I think thatā€™s a common trait among creative types, that they see beauty in things that most others assume shouldnā€™t contain beauty, so they donā€™t look, and those who do see beauty in dark places seem melancholy or strange. With that comes very low lowsā€”lows that people who live in the middle struggle to relate to. We notice everything, so maybe itā€™s frustrating when other people seem oblivious to the things that seemĀ so evident to us. For me, that often results in frustration with other people. I have to checkĀ myself and remember not to hold everyone to my own standards, or hold it against them for not understanding what I’m feeling.

I have to also remind myself that life is worth living because it is so dynamic. I personally prefer to stay away from chemical antidepressantsĀ  (*standard disclaimer that I am not a doctor and this is not a good choice for everyone) because Iā€™ve never had any desire to live in the middle all the time. Iā€™d rather know that lows are part of the game (as much is it sucks) if I can experience the highs and notice the little beauties that often get overlooked. I have to remind myself that this very trait means I have something to offer, a perspective that I take for granted. Contrast–darks against the light–breaks up the monotony and makes people take notice. No two people see the world the same, and even if others see your take on it as weird, maybe itā€™s the extremeness of it that illuminates something that no one else would have noticed. So hang in there; you will feel like singing again.

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