✨ How to cope when you're totally tapped out

On drawing portraits, having kids, and why inconvenience is the new spice of life

Hi friends! You may have noticed I didn’t post every week last month. Things have been very busy on the paid-work front so I’ve had to choose between sending you something thoughtful every other week or sending you something half-baked every week. Inboxes are busy places and I figure it’s more respectful to be there with a better post a little less often until things level out a bit.

Thank you for being on this journey with me, I couldn’t do it without you. 🤗

Adam’s nose has a little bend right in the middle, like it had to quickly hop out of the way of some unexpected interruption mid-way to the valley above the top of his mouth. He’d probably broken it when he was a kid playing rugby or Aussie Rules or some other sport that involved ramming his face into the collar bones of other boys. I carved the shape of it into my notebook, just below his right eyebrow which sat a little too low and leaned a little too far to the left to be considered symmetrical.

“That looks just like him!” Ed, one of his flatmates slams down next to me onto the blanket and leans over my sketchbook. I smile. I was mostly drawing to avoid playing cricket but also because sketching in public is a highwire act. Being watched is almost as good as the thrill of trying to make it to the other side. 

“You see how his nose is a little uneven? And how his right eyebrow doesn’t quite match up with the left?” I wanted to explain the drawing worked because it was a faithful map of Adam’s irregularities … how a good portrait captures what’s really there instead of an idealized version of how a face ought to be.

“Aww! What d’ya say about that one, mate?!” Ed cuffed Adam’s shoulder and I watched the muscles at the back of his jaw go tight. I scrambled, my lifting satisfaction tumbling apart to explain it wasn’t a flaw, actually … all faces are like this, actually … it’s best part of drawing them, actually. But the conversation had moved on, leaving an awkward hole where my admiration had been.

I’m not an idiot, I know it’s terrible to be picked apart in public. I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. I’d spent years making portraits — my own included. I’d forgotten how differently I’d learned to see.

My highschool art teacher would pile up old bottles and boxes and skulls in the center of the room for us to draw. Forget what you think a bottle looks like, he said. Draw the shapes you see. Draw the relationships between things, measure it all through context. What’s the shape of the light? The shadow? Forget what you know and learn it all again. 

Faces are no different. They look even only because they are wonderfully imbalanced. They change with us, molding to our most common expressions as we wear them in. To really draw someone you have to forget who you think they are and spend hours collecting who they’ve become.

Not long after Oscar was born I was on the phone with my aunt complaining about some new stain or ding or dent in some expensive piece of furniture that I had no business buying with a 3 year old on the loose. She laughed and told me that when my cousins were little, she’d called her mother to complain about the stains they were leaving on her walls.

“Leave them.” my grandmother said. “One day you’ll look at them and you won’t see a mess at all.” 

I was never sure about becoming a parent, and the older I got the more the idea seemed like dropping a bomb in the middle of my life. It had taken so much hard work and disappointment and perseverance and I finally felt like I had things they way they should be — my life was on the right track and bringing a baby in would just blow everything up. 

I didn’t want a living room strewn with horrible plastic toys that flash and scream. I didn’t want to give my body over to making and then nursing another person. Most of all I didn’t want to sacrifice my career and become “just another mom” who spent her life wiping snotty noses and waiting with baited breath to feel alive through whatever her kid found interesting.

Last weekend, Oscar and I were driving around looking for a bottle of bubble solution when he piped up from the backseat. 

“Why do some parents not have kids? Do they not like kids?”

He is five and three quarters, so there’s no hope of explaining the utter system failure that has made becoming a parent at best, a great big risk, so I walked out on the ledge to try and explain how I felt about it instead.

I thought my life looked how it was supposed to look. I thought I’d polished everything to perfection. I thought a big title and feeling needed by a toxic job was life’s peak experience. That clean countertops and made me a good person. That a good life was one where I was rarely inconvenienced and spent my free time inventing new ways to scrub away difficult feelings, bad circumstances and tacky furniture. I couldn’t have known how the piercing of that perfect little world would wash me into a deeper, more full throated aliveness than I’d ever felt before. 

A perfect, frictionless life shows up these days in Instagram face and chiclet teeth. In our discomfort with any kind of opinion that deviates from our own. In two day shipping and meal delivery and the absolute slog it was to leave my house on Wednesday to be there for a friend.¹ We have been through hell over the last 7 years and we are absolutely tired and I am still trying to find the motivation to put myself back into the world.

When I’m overloaded, I tend to turn down invitations for anything fun. I say no to anything that won’t directly move me towards my goals (or anything that threatens to pry me out my house.) It’s not long before I look at my calendar and see nothing more than a week of obligation, stress and isolation. I open my phone in the morning with a sinking hopelessness and wonder when my time stopped being my own. When did I get so boring? Why is my life so lame?

This past week was the autumn equilux² — one of the two days in the year when light and dark are in perfect balance. Most of the time when I hear someone say they want more “balance” it’s usually because some part of their life has grown outside it’s container and started to spread into places it’s not supposed to be. Most of the time when I hear someone say burnout, it’s because instead of cutting back the offending area, they went and got a bigger container. And then a bigger container. And a bigger container until there was no more room for anything other than what’s burning them out. They stand on the edges trying to cram themselves back into a life where there’s no more room.

Balance isn’t just fitting in some revenge bedtime scrolling at the end of an exhausting day. Balance can be not cancelling the fun thing you planned a few weeks ago. Balance can be introducing yourself to someone new even when you feel like you’ve got no gas left in the tank. Balance can be doing something that you don’t want to do just because it’s helpful or kind. Balance isn’t some perfect state of equilibrium where there is no discomfort or frustration or fatigue — it’s about making sure the things that drag us down don’t out weigh the things that lift us up, even when they seem inconvenient.

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ICYMI

✨ How to return to a more perfect, primordial self

📝 Practice: Take back your power over work, part two

📝 Practice: Take back your power over work, part one

1. Friends, actually — both of whom are readers! It was totally worth it and being there with you and for you was part of the inspiration for this post. muah.

2. It was also the equiNOX, the day when the sun is perfectly parallel to the earth’s equator — but the equilux comes a few days after in our hemisphere! #themoreyouknow