We had just finished watching the final two episodes of Taylor Swift’s docu-series “The End of an Era.” Neither Mira nor I are Swifties, so this was more educational for us than most and I was just feeling a whole lot of heaviness …. you know the kind of weight that comes from sitting too still for too long inside someone else’s story? Also, the relentless rain didn’t help.
When the screen went black, I looked at Mira and asked “Do you want to try something with me?”
“Ooh! Is it food-related?” she asked. She’s always hungry when she’s sat in front of the TV for a while.
“No. We just ate dinner!” I said. “I was thinking of trying out something new in the studio.”
“Oh! But can I still eat?” she asked as I flung the blanket off me and stretched my back.
“Grab some fruit and cheese,” I said. “I’ll go see what we can do.”
A few minutes later, she rolled over her chair to my workstation, a bowl of sliced persimmon in hand. “These are all uneven,” she commented mid-bite as I was dividing a piece of cardstock into columns with masking tape.
She was right. I peeled the tape back and let her direct me—three strips one way, two the other. I repeated the process on the second sheet of thick white cardstock and handed one to her.
“Now what?” she asked staring at the white spaces, some squares, others rectangles.
I didn’t really know. I reached for the closest tool: two black Sharpies and handed one to her. “Ten seconds,” I said. “Let’s just make squiggles in one continuous line all over the page.”
It felt good to just make a mark without needing it to be anything. “Ok, now what?” she asked. I picked out two Micron pens, both size 08. “Let’s make patterns along the Sharpie line with this pen. One minute total and we must have at least one repetitive pattern per white space without lifting the pen up.”
“Challenge accepted,” she said.
We worked in silence—a beautiful, total silence. Just the skritch-skritch of our pens and the rain. Then we switched to our left hands with a different pen, same rules. Then we picked three colors of distress reinkers without much thought; just the first ones our fingers touched.
Holding a beautiful Da Vinci watercolor brush, I was trying to work this beautiful Mustard Seed on to the paper and it kept fighting me. Basic cardstock isn’t meant to take a wash like this.
But there was no stopping. No refining. No “correcting” the process. I figured we started this without thought, so we aren’t going to let our brains get in the way now. And even though the paper felt wrong, this feeling was right.
These looked like nothing but a mish-mash of line weights, color and patterns. As I stepped back to look at the sheet from a distance, I wondered if each of these spaces could also hold words.
Brave.
Loving.
Patient.
Wise.
I started writing them as they came to mind fitting them within however much space the patterns left for me. Mira rolled her chair over to see what I was doing. “What are those words?” she asked.
“I guess they describe how I see myself,” I said.
She read through them. “Cool. I like them. Should I do the same?”
I shrugged and she said: “Ok, so give me 12 words that describe me…”
“No. This is not about how I see you. It’s about how you see yourself,” I said firmly. “Also: why 12?” I asked.
“Oh, because there are 12 windows,” she said matter-of-factly.
“There are?” I said as I started counting them. Yes, indeed. 12 boxes. One for each month of the year. Creative. Smart. Enough. Gracious. Kind. Thoughtful.
Wait. Could this be a an accidental identity re-anchoring practice I just invented?
This felt like somatic recalibration.
“What is it?” Mira asked, noticing the look on my face.
“This is my 2026 calendar I guess? My year of remembering who I am…” I said, shrugging. “Wouldn’t that be cool?!”
“Why do you sound so surprised?” she asked. “I thought you had a plan this whole time!”
“I really didn’t,” I told her. “But I think now I do.”
She sat there for a minute, looking at her own page filled with words she had chosen for herself. “I have one, too, for next time,” she said, “Now I know what I want to do different. Can I do another one the way I want?”
“Of course!” I said. “However you want to do it. Just not today. It’s bed time.”
By the end of that hour, the room felt lighter.
We hadn’t followed a map; we were just playing in the dark until we found a doorway back to ourselves.
માનસી