Decorate your feelings

an exercise to get through to the next thing / from despair to rage

Every day it feels like I am exposed to the worst thing I have ever seen. It is unrelenting and I am heartbroken. There was a time when I could simply crank out a cartoon whenever this emotion arose - this creativity was impelled by rage. But recently, I’m feeling increasingly paralyzed by despair. Constructive creation and incisive commentary seem impossible (not ideal when you’ve made it your job to do this kind of thing, or when you’re trying to be a person in an ever more fractured world).

I’ve earmarked this quote from James Baldwin:

I never have been in despair about the world. I’ve been enraged by it. I don’t think I’m in despair. I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece. You can’t tell the children there’s no hope.

I don’t think this means a destructive rage that consumes you but a rage that makes you hope for, and want to fight for, a world where everyone is safer.

How to bridge the gap between paralysing despair and galvanizing rage? I do not know. But the other day the only thing I could bring myself to do was sit down and write this down:

And then I wrote it down a few more times:

And then I wrote it really big and decorated it with every Prismacolour marker I own.

my first time using every marker 🙃

Miraculously, I felt better. And maybe this is one thing to do when you’re stuck - to ground yourself in the core value that makes you want to hold onto your rage, give it space on the page and give it colour. And from there, you can draw the strength move forward and engage with the world with your heart and your eyes open, instead of with fear or paralysis. Fear is what causes us to want to annihilate other people, instead of growing ourselves.

We can make it to the next thing, we can go from despair to rage.

xo Zoe