Month 4 of my Year of Intentional Celibacy
At what point is making art about your feelings just keeping you stuck in them?
Some creative processes abstract your feelings. I can design a crochet tapestry about crying, but the stitches I create have nothing to do with tears. They’re just mechanical parts. The first draft of a poem comes from the heart, but as I edit and re-write and turn my focus from emotions to aesthetics, it, too, becomes a mechanical process, less about my own feelings and more about how to evoke something in the reader.
Personal essays and blog posts like this feel the most vulnerable to write. While finding the right words and phrasings is part of the work, your main job is just to be honest. And to be honest with the reader, you need to be constantly honest with yourself. So you dig and you dig into yourself, unearthing anything you’ve been avoiding — but the thing about digging a hole is that you must also fall into it. When you’re done digging, will the words be enough to drag you back up onto sturdier ground?
In all honesty, I feel a bit like I’ve fallen off my boat in the middle of an ocean right now (sorry for the sudden switch in metaphors). Any direction I look, there’s just more water. My gaze lingers on his favourite frozen pizza at the grocery store for a moment too long. A car the exact same colour as his drives past. He still exists a 20-minute bus ride away. A text away. A Chess.com friend request away.
The boat is still right there. I just need to figure out how to climb back into it.
I’ll be fine I’ll be fine I’ll be fine I’ll be fine I’ll be fine I’ll be fine
What I’ve Made
I think I made a lot of things in April?
I wrote some short stories and poems and an essay that I later printed out and cut up and turned into a poem-zine. This was a very satisfying process and I kind of want to make more.
I’ve been sketching and painting and crocheting and received my first paid commission from a friend who wanted something handmade as a gift for a friend’s baby, which was very exciting. Please pay me to make stuff!!!!
I’ve been taking a bit of a break from my website in favour of more “analog” art, but I did make a simple gallery page, currently displaying my fibre arts projects and some zines.
What I’ve Read/Watched/etc.
There’s nothing more inspirational than watching other people do cool stuff, and I live in a city where people are always doing cool stuff. The most memorable event I went to in April was for “musical readings” by Doung Anwar Jahangeer and Guy-André Lagesse. Doung made improvised music for us using just his voice and an app on his phone, while Guy selected works out of a curated pile of books in front of him (mostly postcolonial literature) and read aloud from them. The performance had a really special energy, and me and my friend have since been considering doing something similar for an upcoming open mic night…
I read The Analog Sea Review: Number Two, a collection of essays, interviews, poetry and paintings across multiple themes and genres put together by Jonathan Simons of Analog Sea, an offline publisher (meaning: if you go on their website, all it provides is an address to send letters to). The book itself is beautiful, and the writers in this volume include Albert Einstein, James Baldwin, Leonard Cohen, Henry David Thoreau, Guy Debord, Pope Francis… I loved starting my mornings with a few new pages, never sure what I would find next. There was a section on solitude and creativity, which is kind of what my whole 2026 is about — my favourite piece was Solitude and the Creative Life by Fenton Johnson, an extract from his book At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, which is now on my TBR.
A few Substack essays I really enjoyed:
‘I’m Happily Married But I’m Still Hung Up On My Ex!’ by Ask Polly — this really gave me new perspective on some things and I need to remember to re-read it more often
what would you post if the man didn’t exist by Savannah Brown
And now it’s May, my birthday month! NGL I am so broke that I can’t even feel any distress around ageing because every month I need to survive feels like a burden right now. And there are still so many years to get through. Um. See you when I’m 28!