A Little Life Update

With random drawings from my sketchbook

I won’t be posting new comics this or next week. In eight days, I’ll be packing up my half of this home and moving into an apartment. It will be the first time I’ve ever lived alone (though I’ll have my daughter half time).

Poorly scanned horses

Moving is exhausting. Dividing the minutiae of life built with a partner over the last 18 years is unconscionable. It’s criminally petty— like ‘who gets the can opener’ trifling.

A vase

Every day is its own excruciating unit of time. I try not to think beyond it.

Portrait of the artist under duress

I do, though. I wonder how I will afford to live alone (or live at all). About how our daughter will adjust to her weird new life. About whether I’ll be able to find a full-time job and secure health insurance and a million other things.

A dear friend said to me on the phone this week that grief is what happens to you, and mourning is what you do. He said, “You’re finally going to have the chance to mourn.”

In August of 2023, we decided to open our marriage. In February 2024, we decided to separate. We’ve been living together through all of it, coparenting and cohabitating through our grief, rage, loneliness, relief, hurt, all of it. The full spectrum of human emotion, I think.

In January 2025, I was admitted to the hospital with anemia severe enough to warrant blood transfusions and 6 weeks of outpatient iron infusions. I’ve been back to the hospital for various medical appointments and procedures frequently since then, while doctors try and figure out what’s wrong with me.

View from my room in the ER, before admission

Good things have happened too. I wrote another book. I got a Masters degree. I started dating a fella I like a lot.

This is not that fella. It’s my real boyfriend, John Milton.

But the thing I am most grateful for is my recovery community. No matter how I show up, I am met with acceptance, love, and care. No matter how many times I call my friends sobbing or send weird texts about who’s going to get the can opener and exactly where someone can shove that can opener, I am met with patience. I’m not told what I want to hear, but what I need (“just buy a new can opener”).

Somehow, everything will be ok. And in eight days, for the first time in my life, I’ll have my own place.

See you on the other side.