zines and friendships and dolphins
🌀 tiny ramble (a little note from me to you)
Hello my internet friend,
This week, I created and shared this little zine I made about parental mental illness and grief and it seemed to resonate with a few people on IG. I really find the practice of making zines super therapeutic and I have a pretty exciting idea for how to integrate them into my work.
(If you’re immediately thinking monthly zine making club with prompts and printables, then I think you’re going to be really into this new offer that’s coming soon.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about my work and my offers and the season that we are collectively in and I want to focus on two things right now — desire and creativity.
The sort of big questions I’m playing with are:
Why do we find it hard to own what we want?
(I dare you to hit reply to this email and tell me one thing you want. It’s not always so easy to own it, and then even bigger step to say it out loud to another person.)
What can we gain from focusing on play and namely engaging in creative practices?
(In our Emerge call this week I said something like “so I’m going to have you all draw a timeline…” and one person put in the chat: “You said "draw" and I immediately hate this idea”.)
I believe magic is desire made real, and that play really is the antidote to perfectionism and that’s part of what makes it so hard.
(It should be easier because there is no way to get it wrong, but that also means there are no guidelines to getting it right which is a really uncomfortable place for those of us who rely on following rules and getting it right all the time.)
And I really believe that focusing on just these two things can radically change the relationship you have with people in your life and with joy and with the idea of purpose.
📝 wanderings
Friendships: My therapist taught me about face-to-face friendships versus side-by-side friendships, and this concept kind of blew my mind. If you’ve never heard of it the idea is that some people really love and prefer face-to-face friendships where you’re looking at each other and talking and interacting and the focus is on each other. Other people prefer side-by-side friendships where you do things together, like sit on the couch and watch reality TV or do a puzzle together or go for walks. You can also talk, there’s just less eye contact and the focus is kind of on the activity. I’m 100000% in this side-by-side camp. I like friendships where have a thing in common, like we knit together, or we both run our own businesses, or we read similar books. As much as I love deep conversations, and as much as I’m not a small talk person, there’s something about a relationship built on sharing your daily Wordle results that actually feels so warm and lovely and steadying to me.
Are dolphins friendly or creepy? I’ve been thinking about it a bit and I’m just not sure I trust dolphins. I like a humpback whale, an orca, a manatee, but dolphins give me the creeps a bit. It’s just a vibe, I can’t explain it.
⚡️inspiration list
Pandemic Legacy (Season 1): Despite the name, this is a board game not a TV show. Essentially you’re playing a team of specialist sent to save the world from being overrun by viruses. (It came out before we lived in a global pandemic but it’s still fun, though sometimes too on the nose when you can’t save a city from experiencing multiple outbreaks and you get to watch that virus slowly spread across the world.) It’s a legacy game which means you play it multiple times and it sort of evolves every time you play — the rules change, things that went well or badly in previous games affect future games. Elle and I have been playing weekly with our 13-year-old son and it’s a hit with all three of us. (And this is actually my second time playing through it and I’m still loving it, so that’s really saying something.) It’s pretty hard to get a teenager excited about things, so I just wanted to offer this out as a recommendation if you have pre-teens/teens that you’d like to spend some time with. (It’s also great with just a bunch of adults, but you do kind of want to play with the same group every time and it takes 12-24 play-throughs to complete so that’s something to keep in mind.)
Australian Survivor started this week. It’s already so good. It’s wayyyyy better than American Survivor and if you happen to be watching it please let me know so we can have a side-by-side friendship discussing the episodes.
🗝️ offerings (what I’m putting out into the world)
There’s only 4 spots left for Snail Mail if you want one! I’m posting it out next week and basically it’s completely free and signing up means you’ll get a monthly letter/art project/secret note/something from me in the post. It’s my way of building offline community and a deeper kind of connection.
My book is pay what you can! As I’ve been diving more and more into the world of zines I’ve realised that my little book — Is it Enough Yet? — better fits in that world. It’s a creative non-fiction story about finding enoughness, with illustrations and fairytale elements. At 88 pages it’s awkward to call it a book, but will be perfect once stripped down into a zine. I would have done it this way from the start I think but I just didn’t know what zines were when I wrote it. So I’m going back to the dashboard and reimagining the whole thing. Butttt…I would love to find homes for the last of the few printed copies I have so they don’t go to waste. So I’ve set the price to pay what you can (plus postage) and would love if you could help me give them a new home!
🧶 wrapping up
If you want to continue the conversation, hit reply and tell me something that made you happy this past week. I love hearing from y’all.
Talk soon,
Joeli
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P.S. If you enjoyed this or found it helpful, I would super appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. Take a picture and post on social media or forward it to someone or mention it over coffee. If you want to share a link, buttondown.com/joeli is the one to send people to.