leaning into sad girl summer

+ i ran the half marathon

Announcement!

If you’re in Vancouver, find me at the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival on May 20-21! For the first time since 2019, I’ll be at my little table selling prints (including limited edition New Yorkers), a VanCAF exclusive zine, and drawing custom cartoons on stickers! I’ll also be on a panel on Saturday with fellow Pulitzer nominee Pia Guerra and others, talking about documenting moments in time. Truly cannot wait.

Now onto the stuff:

I emerge to report that I ran my first half marathon since 2015 and it went great.

Official chip time was 1:40:42, a fact reflected on my face but not on the clock

I had no goals except to finish without injury, which I achieved, with the added benefit of feeling really strong and running as fast as I physically could the whole time! Race-day adrenaline really does carry you through the difficult portions. I daresay that I enjoy running again and am excited for this to be a healthy, functional part of my life going forward.

sketches --> final

We’re approaching the one year anniversary of my running comic in the New Yorker, a story that exploded out of me like a tentacled monster in a year filled with so much grief. I thought that completing the half marathon might feel like a sort of full-circle catharsis, but it hasn’t been that dramatic. I’m mostly quietly relieved and happy to have reclaimed this part of myself, and to be past that very hard time.

As proof of how unserious this all is, I drew only one half marathon cartoon and it’s about how eating three GU gels across 100 minutes of sprinting before 9am does not feel good.

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I’ve been falling behind in paid content/literally everything because a family member is unexpectedly in the hospital, and the last couple of weeks have been filled with lots of this.

It has been a lot and i’ve only just started to be able to draw anything about it! Really had to drag myself out of that spot where drawing just feels useless forever.

permanent state of affairs

Some lightness:

accurate shirt

heat wave in May

I’m really leaning into my SAD PERSON PLAYLIST to help emotionally decompress on commutes (thanks for the tip, my therapist!), and it’s almost entirely boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers, The National and Radiohead, infamously creating sad music for sad people since all of their inception.

I am sort of loving it though, because this is just my favourite music anyway?! I’m so grateful that something as easy as blasting music can be so massively transformative.

was definitely listening to phoebe bridgers as this was taken

I paid out the nose to go to a Phoebe Bridgers concert last year by myself and I cried through most of it. I also saw The National last summer at Edmonton Folk Fest, and though I didn’t cry, I did get a nosebleed so bad that the medical personnel gave up on trying to stop it and just taped a tampon into my nostril.

worth it!!

This summer i’m seeing boygenius and The National in concert and i’m READY to be so, so sad and for it to feel so good.

18 year old zoe would approve of present-day coping mechanisms (radiohead concert, 2008)

If you’re still reading, your assignment is to go listen to a song you love - loudly, incessantly, on repeat. And then go outside.

xo Zoe