No. 84 - Celebrating the wins of 2024

Feeding the monster, feeding the wolf

Dec 31, 2024

This photo. Christmas dinner at my Aunt Elsie’s house, 1969 or 1970 I reckon. Me at the back, holding a plate and looking up warily at my mother. The whole tableau giving “the last supper” vibes with all the reaching and conferring.

I felt genuine shock when my cousin Sylvia sent me this photo a few months back because I’d never seen it. The childhood photos that you’ve seen a million times don’t have the same impact. Or any impact. This one hit me like a ton of bricks and I couldn’t stop going back to look at it for days.

The look I’m giving my mother feels like evidence—I was always watching for her moods, because I never knew what I was going to get. And I know I’m getting old, but am I really from that era? Apparently so. It’s such a slice o’ life that it ought to be in a time capsule. Plus my God, what a beautiful painting it would make.

You can’t really see my Grama at the back behind my Aunt, but she was the bedrock for me. Seemingly always there in the kitchen. Solid. Providing the three meals a day, the clean and tended home, and the Christmas magic. We loved each other. My relationship with her helped mitigate the one I had with my mother, and I’m lucky she was in my life. I’m now almost as old as she was in this photo, but I’ve been missing her keenly this holiday season.

MISS YOU GRAMA ❤️

2024

It was a very up-and-down-y year, what with my mother-in-law dying and me getting Covid for the first time and flying to Montreal ten days later only to almost shit my pants while walking through the 33° (feels like 40°) heat dome with sweat pouring down my body, among other indignities. Then being out of it for a couple of months with brain fog and finding myself literally incapable of gathering my thoughts, but not understanding what was happening to me. The summer months were lost months.

Oh well.

I sometimes forget when I’m out and about in the world that I write this newsletter and lots of people I know (and many I don’t) read it and are aware of said ups-and-downs. I don’t mind—if I did, I wouldn’t write about these things. Believe me, there’s plenty that I don’t mention. But I forget how much of myself is out there. I find myself telling someone something about my life and getting a look from them that says “tell me something I don’t know”. Oh. Right. Sorry.

Please forgive me for repeating myself, here and in the flesh.

On with WINNING.

I got the idea for celebrating wins in this post from Michael Estrin of Situation Normal, but it also brought to mind something that a counsellor suggested I do when I was in my early forties. After leaving art school I’d moved across the country with my partner David and become a Mom, but to my mind “that’s all that I was”. I was making very little art, certainly had no career, and told my counsellor that I felt like a loser. I mean I really did, and it kind of breaks my heart to think that I felt that way about myself. Especially as I was in the process of raising a very special human. My counsellor suggested that I write the story of my life, re-framing it to focus more on the positive aspects. To find the wins.

To my amazement, find them I did. Quite easily. I’ve never thought of myself as a loser again and it’s my heartfelt wish that no-one else ever would, either. I don’t remember how the counsellor explained the exercise to me, but I’ll never forget the impact it had. Not only the obvious impact on how I felt about myself during that period in my life, but it also informed my worldview ever after.

Never believe the shit your brain is telling you. It’s not always telling you the truth. But also, use your brain to turn that shit around. We’re telling ourselves stories, constantly. About who we are. How people see us. What we’re good at, what we’re bad at. How we’ve been misunderstood. What it all means. Well, I do, anyway. And I think you do, too.

Tell yourself a better story. Because the better story is no less true.

The exercise the counsellor gave me demonstrated the “feed the wolf” story to me like nothing else ever could. Here’s the Google AI blurb about that story:

The "feed the wolf" story is a legend about a battle between two wolves within a person, and the idea that the wolf you feed is the one that wins. The story is often told as a grandfather or elder sharing wisdom with a young person. The elder describes the two wolves, one representing good qualities like love and bravery, and the other representing bad qualities like fear and hatred. When the young person asks which wolf wins, the elder replies, "whichever one you feed".

It’s true. What you focus on is what grows. If you’re focused on the project you’re working on, and you’re thinking about it as you go to bed at night, you’re going to generate ideas. If you’re getting into the studio every day (note: I’m not) and you’re allowing your creativity full reign, it’s going to grow. If you’re obsessing about all the ways that you’re falling short, missing the mark, underachieving, well… that’s what grows.

And on that note…

FEEDING THE WOLF WITH SOME WINS!

Though I wrote some shite here about “oh no, I didn’t post Feed the Monster exactly once a month and yikes, how fucked up must I be”, in retrospect I see that although the timing became irregular around May/June, I posted the same number of newsletters as I always have. AND on top of that I posted fourteen hand-painted/drawn newsletters under the moniker of Taking Note. The Taking Note experiment was not to last, but that’s okay! My God, I’m WINNING!
In May I held the journaling workshop I’d been talking about creating for a year, TAKING NOTE: Creating Ourselves Through Journaling. I’d never held a Zoom workshop before but I lived to tell the tale, thanks to help from Jill Margo, David P. Smith and Chloe Lampman, who ran though early iterations with me. I learned a lot, and the participants who responded to my survey after the workshop all gave glowing reviews. Read some of those here! I need to find new ways to describe this workshop, because “journaling workshop” can be a real buzz-kill.
Though Covid threw me for a loop in June and I was out-to-lunch for months, I eventually did succeed in teaching myself to use Loom and made a video download of TAKING NOTE: Creating Ourselves Through Journaling to offer up for sale. This is for people who, like me, would sometimes rather do a workshop all by themselves with a nice cup of coffee or tea rather than participate in a Zoom meeting where they have to show their face or (SHUDDER) be put into a “break-out room” with strangers (PLEASE GOD NO). If you know anyone who shares this affliction, please direct them to my workshop. Also if you know anyone who wants to deepen their journaling practice and/or simply use writing exercises to defrag and learn more about themselves, please direct them to my workshop. Thank you.
A few of my notebook pages were featured in Jillian Hess’s Noted, which is of course a thrill because Noted is one of my favourite and most essential newsletters. The first time Jillian mentioned me, in a post back in February, I woke up to scores of new subscribers that ended up totaling over a hundred by the end of the day. As I remarked to a friend, it gave me the taste of blood. This time, I got one or two new subscribers, haha. Part of the reason for this I think is how much Substack has changed (read: exploded), and how with the advent of “followers”, people are less likely to immediately subscribe. Possibly? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. The honour of being mentioned in Noted is the same.
I submitted a few words and photos of my Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir project to Uppercase Magazine and learned that they’ll be part of a feature called Transformative Creativity in their Jan-Feb-March 2025 issue. Thank you Janine.
Some of these trips were fraught for various reasons, but I did have the opportunity to go to Ucluelet, Alberta, Montreal, Vermont, Horne Lake and Toronto in 2024. In Vermont, my old friend Sheri was a healing balm. In Toronto, we saw our daughter Chloe dance. In Alberta I witnessed my husband David speak movingly about his mother at her memorial service, and in Ucluelet I had my 64th birthday in rainy BC splendor.
I got to interview my dear friend, creativity guide Jill Margo. It was my first stab at interviewing, and of course Jill did all the heavy lifting with her comprehensive and juicy answers. (PS, invest in yourself and your creative practice in the new year with Jill’s upcoming Follow-Through Sessions! “A Whole Season of Accountability, Encouragement, and In-it-togetherness”).

WHAT WILL 2025 BRING?

Unknown. Unclear.

Each year I start a new idea book for the year, which I usually embellish the front of. This is where I keep notes for any projects I’m working on, plus notes for this newsletter and my website. I also normally come up with a word or phrase to set the tone for the new year, which I then draw on the first page of the idea book. I’ve felt shy to do that this year, because last year my phrase was rest and healing and I’m not sure I got that. Or did I? Unclear.

I bought a new planner at the Art Gallery of Ontario gift shop while in Toronto. For the front of the planner I cut out a section of a page from an old Dutch world atlas given to me by J. McLaughlin:

Maybe the word for 2025 should be unclear. No no no, that’s just asking for trouble. Maybe it should be zuid pool.

One thing that is clear is that I’ve just started The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, it’s fantastic, and it’ll surely inspire further explorations in note-taking, mark-making, drawing, journaling, and generally thinking with my hands on paper.

In keeping with this, a live, in-person Taking Note: Creating Ourselves Through Journaling workshop is still in the works at Aunty Collective here in Victoria BC—more on that when a date has been set.

—NEWSFLASH—

On December 29th I read Kelcey Ervick’s newest post in The Habit of Art and got very fired up. She writes about not just choosing a word or phrase for the new year, but actually giving herself more of an imperative to live by, which has proven to be effective for her. I’m happily very inspired by this, and am going to consider my options during the first week of January when I’ll be on a self-imposed retreat for defrag and recharge. Thanks Kelcey!

…and thank you for your continued support and readership. It means everything, and I ain’t whistling Dixie!

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Feed the Monster