Where have I been? Where have YOU been?

Showing off my new project + feeling weird

At around 1:00 AM on Friday night my youngest child crept into our room and flopped onto our mattress.

“I feel weird,” he said.

Half-awake, I ran through the list of midnight ailments in my head. Had he thrown up? Had an accident? A nightmare?

I asked him, “Weird in what way?”

“I can’t keep my head up.”

Eventually we figured out that he was feeling dizzy (he had no language for this) and his ear was hot—so we diagnosed a midnight ear infection. With nothing to do until morning, I propped him up with half a dozen pillows and held his hand as he fell back asleep on the couch.

He just finished a round of antibiotics, and besides the milky white ear drops giving him further feelings of “weirdness,” he seems to be OK. There was a moment over the weekend when I was ready to call an Uber to the ER because he insisted he couldn’t move his neck. He screamed any time I tried to reposition him (I was convinced it was meningitis) but about five minutes later I realized he had just been laying on it weird.

After a stretch and a glass of water, he was OK again.

Weirdness all the way down.

If I’m honest, I’ve been a bit weird myself lately. The child’s ear infection converged with a few other situationships (plus the what-felt-like-it-was-never-ending snowfall) that left me feeling exhausted and sad. My body is craving rest and decompression—even the smallest task requires monumental effort and heaps of rest.

This winter has felt different, somehow—leaner, more cruel. In addition to the snow, there have been quite a few folks in my immediate circle who are struggling (battling, waging war) with health crises—chronic pain, immobility, loss of executive function (no ADHD meds anywhere!) and motor function, infertility, migraines, anxiety, depression, etc.

I’ve been struggling with my own health issues, and they’ve entered my life like a part-time job. Managing my health and the attendant feelings of inadequacy, moral failure, and guilt takes time and gentleness, which are resources I don’t always have, especially for myself.

I’m not always nice to me.

I also know folks who are wading through the muddy waters of fresh grief, and even more whose grief has been stirred into something cold and monstrous (mine included).

I’ve been going on long drives and crying at the gym, sopping up snot and tears in the sleeves of my sweatshirt like a kid sucker-punched on the playground. I try not to be embarrassed of being in my feelings so much—it keeps me honest. I’ve been asking for more help, more forgiveness, more patience, more gentleness, more space from things and situations that break my heart.

Thank you for letting me show up here as I am—sad and angry and full of sighs.

I’m also not feeling so great about Instagram lately, so I’ve given myself some distance. I’ve always had pretty good boundaries on how and when to engage there, but lately it’s become something that feels weighty instead of fun, so I’m posting old comics there and focusing my creativity elsewhere.

Which brings me to what I have been up to: I’ve been working hard on a new project! Like really working on it, hours and hours and hours. I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but it was so fuzzy and nebulous—just piles of notes and old word docs—so I had nothing to share. I’m writing and drawing a mythical retelling of my Grandmother’s childhood in WWII Germany. She had a lot of tragedy in the first few decades of her life, and I’ve often looked back on her story to help explain the trauma that lives in my own body.

The brutality of the war, coupled with the early death of her mother is at the heart of her childhood, and I finally feel—with the addition of my own drawings—that I found a way to explore it. It’s part memoir, part fairy tale, part ghost story—which feels like the right amalgam of parts for me.

It’s a project I worked on for years as a traditional novel, futzing around with pieces here and there that didn’t quite fit. Recently I decided to turn it into a graphic novel and it’s felt all fresh and new and interesting again.

Here are the first three pages:

I know! they don’t really tell a story! Not yet—but I’m working hard and having fun in the delirious honeymoon of starting something new. They’re not perfect, but I’m happy to share these first impressions of the book anyway.

I’ll even give you a close up of those bones because they took so, so long to draw, and I want you to get another look at the inky detail:

Bones upon bones.

I’ve been drawing just bones for about three weeks now. I can’t help but think of it as a kind of meditative practice, a daily immersive memento mori that I get to slip into until the kids are home from school. It takes everything to resist the impulse that I’m wasting time—that I’m not doing enough fast enough.

But since starting this Substack, I’ve realized that no one is going to come into my life and tell me that I can make the things I want to make. I have to extend that permission to myself (which is such a bum deal, honestly).

On the other hand, if you need someone to extend some permission to you, I’ll be that person.

Go and do the weird, time-wasting thing that no one is asking you to do.

There. You have permission.

Thanks for being here, my friends. I hope that this long winter is finally lifting—metaphorically, if not physically. And if it’s not winter where you are, then I hope that summer is melting into something milder, cooler, more forgiving.

We all need a little more forgiveness.

All my love and weirdness,

💀Becca Lee, Haunted Librarian💀