What Makes You Feel Like Yourself?

Sketchbook Drawing: Dancing Leaf 11” x 14”

I just made a list of everything I did in 2024 that made me “feel good.” Turns out, it was a lot of things.

Which is great because 2023 was one of the hardest years of my life, so 2024 was, on aggregate, a much better year.

Which I only really acknowledged after making this list.

Which reminded me how easy it is to gloss over or minimize what is going right in our lives because we’re so busy focusing on what is wrong, lacking, or needs improvement.

It also made me remember a lot more of what happened over the course of the year; just remembering was a win. And to acknowledge the upside of even really hard stuff—like how we lost two beloved fur family members, but at least sent them off with love and dignity.

I was sort of surprised by how good my “what made me feel good’ list made me feel, so I thought I’d share it to perhaps inspire you to consider making a list of your own.

2024: Things I Did that Made me Feel Good

• Started this Substack newsletter in February.

  • Slowly learned the back end of this complicated platform.

  • Wrote a post every week.

  • Experienced my newsletter as a creative outlet in its own right.

  • Rediscovered my writer self. (This was huge for me.)

  • Became more fully expressed by embracing writing as a creative outlet again—and, as a result, my creativity itself is now more…balanced. This surprisingly helped me release a lot of residual garbagio I’ve been lugging around of needing to “prove” myself as an artist to my mother. Especially since she’s been dead a decade. And that it was my writing practice that gave me this gift sort of amazes me.

  • Found great satisfaction in posting both casual sketchbook pages and images of finished artwork in my newsletters versus posting those images on social media. Choosing an image to go with my post each week is so much more intentional and has married my writing and art practices in an unexpected way.

  • I made a special handmade book for my founding subscribers and I loved the whole process. It felt like making presents.

• Shed some self-doubt by doing all of the above. I feel surprisingly more confident about my innate abilities. I actually understand them more fully as innate abilities rather than something I’ve achieved only through hard work. This has changed my self-perception.

• Made progress in what I was desiring to change in my sketch-book practice:

  • Consciously carved out space to make more private art just for myself.

  • Prioritized it as a practice—I gave creating in my sketchbook equal weight to making finished work for the wall or the public sphere.

  • Got more comfortable working with materials I don’t normally use through my sketchbook practice. That’s been a fun expansion of how I perceive the job of my sketchbook. Not just a place for ideas. A place to explore materials.

• Experimented (ongoing) with different ways to deepen my art practice into a more expansive spiritual practice. This feels good-good-good!

• Took a Risograph workshop that I’ve wanted to take for two years.

• Experimented using A.I. in several different ways with mostly excellent results—such as creating travel itineraries; or asking it arcane questions about natural dyeing or spirituality; or my favorite—getting it to do math for me. I suck at math. And A.I. loves math—it told me. Lots of thoughts about A.I. now. Sure, it’s complicated, but glad I’m not just hating it in a knee jerk way as I was before.

• Bought a few gorgeous art books that feed my soul, even though they were expensive. (Like The Red Book by C.J. Jung.)

• Splurged on a fancy train trip with my family for my birthday. (I always feel a little sick inside when I spend a lot of money, AND, it was so worth it.)

• Committed myself to a deep dive into natural dyeing and learned a tremendous amount in a very short space of time. Still learning.

• Fulfilled a years-long yearning to plant a cut-flower garden and, lo and behold, it was successful. I was fully prepared for a 90% fail.

  • I pick-axed a twelve foot bed in rock hard soil. Very hard but very satisfying.

  • Asked for help in setting up drip irrigation and got it. (Thank you R.K.! Thank you J.!)

  • Made bouquets every couple of days throughout the summer. Giant yes to this.

  • Experienced great joy tending my cut flower garden every day and deepened my understanding of flowers as magical elders on planet Earth.

  • Successfully grew a bumper crop of zucchini in the challenging gardening conditions of Taos. My first time having success growing vegetables here.

  • Laid down cardboard and manure for two more beds in spring.

  • Learned the ins and outs of how to do “soil blocking” as a new way to grow my seedlings inside. Two thumbs up.

  • Successfully sowed wildflowers in several other new but empty garden beds and expanded my understanding of the role wildflowers can play in my garden.

    • I’m finally feeling like I know a bit more about what I’m doing as a gardener growing plants at 7,000’ under a bright southwestern sun. That feels GOOD because it’s HARD to garden here.

• Finally got back to doing strength training on the regular. This matters a lot to me because things I like to do require that I be physically strong—like gardening or arranging large rocks or carrying really heavy buckets of water for dyeing. And can I just say that in 2023, I self-medicated with a lot of French vanilla ice cream and being horizontal watching old Maigret re-runs (the 1950’s series with Rupert Davies), so this is important.

• I also added the “Single Leg Romanian Dead Lift” and the “Kneeling Wood Chop” techniques to my weight-lifting routine. These two additions have been surprising game changers for improving my balance and core strength.

• I finally hung Christmas lights outside on our courtyard wall and on the fence around J.’s workshop for the holidays this year. Small but joyful! It induced me to buy more all year round twinkle lights to install around our patio.

Creating, Making, Learning

So basically, what makes me feel good is creating, writing, gardening and learning. Creating, making, doing. Learning, learning, learning.

I’ve always been someone who is constantly trying and learning new things. But framing these things as activities that make me feel good has shifted my perception of them away from ‘achieving’ or ‘accomplishing’ to simply being my way of being myself. How I enjoy being alive on planet Earth.

How about you? What makes you feel most like yourself? How do you enjoy being alive on planet Earth? Leave a comment, I’d love to know.