🐢 listening to our animal bodies

I am going to miss my apartment so damn much.

Hi friends,

Merry merry etc. etc.

Thank you so all much for your kind messages after last week's emo dump! It continues to amaze me how–despite email being a one-sided format–I get replies and even have lovely IRL conversations about the contents here. I never expected a weekly email practice to feel so interactive and nourishing, so thank you for making it so.

It's the holidays. I'm at my mother's house in suburban Massachusetts. I just had my coffee with eggnog in it, a handful of Hershey kisses before 9am, and my diet has been over 50% sugar for weeks now. I feel like shit, but here are some things that have made me feel good this week:
 

1.  A Feelings Post. After I send an email like last week's or tap out an earnest caption on Instagram, I get what I call a "vulnerability hangover." It's mostly just crippling embarrassment. I want to disappear off the face of the earth. 

In the midst of last week's vulnerability hangover, Anne Helen Peterson sent her weekly Culture Study newsletter about "feelings posts:"

"We like feelings posts not because we don’t like analysis or reading ideas that challenge and provoke us — you all certainly like those, too — but because they’re implicit invitations. When we say that something makes us feel “seen,” we are talking about some form of identification, but we are also talking about making one’s own feelings, so often submerged and denied, into something visible, palpable, tastable. Others’ feelings help give shape to my own."

2. PEN15. If you're a 28-35 year old woman who was not cool in middle school, this cringe comedy is mandatory viewing. My friend Sophie suggested it (and like a true friend texted me her Hulu login so I could watch it) and I tore through it within days. It made me so, so, so happy.


3. Weak Ends. I'm always thinking about how to slow down more. I love this comic from Sophie Lucido Johnson about listening to our animal bodies during the winter season. I also love this blog from Austin Kleon, "I am no longer weakened by the weekend," about Shabbat and the restorative power of taking time off. Per Sophie's caption, all of this is so hard to adopt in a capitalist system, but damn, I'd love for us to try.

Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who ordered from my shop this season! I'm so excited to make more art in the new year and your support makes it possible.

If you missed out on the Winter Solstice Bandana but still want one, please let me know by responding to this email! A few folks have inquired and I *could* do another order, but I'm not sure if enough people want them to make it worth it... so get at me!

Thanks for reading!

Stay tender, y'all.

(Christine Tyler Hill is the human behind Tender Warrior Co.)