i need to be okay with not knowing
I went on a trip to New Orleans recently, and I had a thought while I was recovering from a guilt spiral: I need to be okay with not knowing.
I read a graphic novel earlier this week called Wretched by Henrik Rehr and Jan Solheim.1 I keep revisiting this graphic novel because reading it was a fully present experience. I’m not someone who usually gets immersed in a book despite being a former bookseller and reading a whole heck of a lot. I have ADHD, and it is always a bit of practice to focus on books.
Wretched is a dreamlike journey. A woman cycles through these hours of confusion, meeting men, yearning for her dad’s safety, and hearing confusing murmurings of strangers around her. Neither the reader nor the woman knows what’s going on. It is simply a trance experience.
I’ve been thinking about not knowing in the current state of the world. Each time I mindlessly open substack’s notes in the app in an attempt to look at something outside of meta, outside of twitter, I see the word “resistance” incorporated into another essay. It has become like self-care, a buzz word to remain topical and suggest insufficiency. I appreciate the organizers and the writers tackling the tricky subject of this time, but I don’t know how to find myself among the fearmongering subtitles featuring the word “apocalypse.”
I found the poster below scrolling my “words” tag on my tumblr. A different version of me saw it and hit reblog, and it was as helpful then as it is now. I can only live in the present.
I create art to capture this present and make sense of it all. I write off all of my experiences as creative practice. I want to understand it all, but I settle for scraps of fabric, felting wool, tombow markers, and the brush of my digital pen against my paper-like screen. In this, I can be sure.
I’m making a larger size of the sticker below that will be 10 by 3 inches rather than the current 5 by 2 inches:
i launched the patreon for sculder and mully last week, and i’d love for you to check it out if you want to see exclusive memes
i’ve been really into hands holding things lately, so imagine my excitement when i found a public domain image pack with this:
For anyone interested in the book, I want to give a content warning for drug use and physical abuse.