Originally published on Substack on 7 August 2025. To receive a letter like this in your inbox each month, join the mailing list.
This is the first time in my life I have written something without using my hands.
What I mean to say is: I'm using voice dictation to write this. It's an odd sensation, especially as someone who has been a writer in some capacity for most of my life. I feel strange: like I'm talking to myself.
There is a magic intimacy in writing; your consciousness appears as if conjured right onto the page. Through this alchemical process, thought becomes word, phrase, and passage right before your eyes. It's a whole different experience hearing my own tentative voice fumble out of my mouth.
Why are you doing it, then?
I recently sustained an injury in my hand, beneath my skin, in a part of my body that I cannot see but can very much feel. And this injury has gradually worsened.
I've been to the doctor and seen an occupational therapist, and I'm now waiting for an x-ray to give further insights into what's going on. I am currently on holiday in Germany, and over the last three days my pain has worsened from something that was manageable until I tried to use my hand, to now something ever-present. I can feel my heart beating in my fingers. I can't hold a pencil. I can't hold my phone. I can't make a fist or do much of anything with my right hand.
There's something tender in the way the mind tries to protect us from reality. When this all started, I comforted myself by saying that if I followed my doctors' and therapist's counsel, in a few weeks I'd be back to "normal," like nothing happened. My body would be "mine" again in the way that I've always known it to be—ready and available for me whenever I need it. But it's becoming evident to me that that may not be the case, at least not right away.
There's a fine line between abandoning hope and allowing yourself to be in difficulty fully, opening your heart to it, and letting it envelop you. In Mahayana Buddhism, this openness is part of cultivating bodhichitta, the aspiration to awaken not just for oneself, but for the benefit of all beings. Bodhichitta is the decision to keep your heart open to suffering, yours and others’, not out of resignation, but out of a wish to relieve that suffering.
To me, this looks like letting suffering carve away at you, smoothing your hard edges and softening your heart like running water against stone. "We awaken this bodhichitta, this tenderness for life, when we can no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence," writes Pema Chödrön in When Things Fall Apart, a book I'm currently re-reading. But I'd be lying to you if I said I had fully surrendered to my current reality. The last days have been filled with a lot of fear, self-pity, and rumination about the future, about my art practice, about my ability to make a living.
As someone who is able-bodied, I'm hesitant to overstate what this temporary physical setback has taught me. But I share my experiences and insights from a place of love and humility, and in the hope that it might speak to someone.
In the pockets where I have been able to find stillness and acceptance of what is, I have found moments of peace and freedom that I might not have found my way to had my circumstances stayed as they usually are. My injury has shown me how much I took my body's cooperation for granted, how much I expected it to be there for me without question, and how much more compassion and gratitude it deserves from me.
I'm not the only one who treats my body like a machine. Most of us who have been conditioned by capitalism have come to regard our most precious assets—our bodies, our hands, our minds—as tools readily available to us, built to be wielded to buy ourselves capital, attention, financial means, or other success metrics. I've looked to my body as something that would always be there for me and function without any issue. But bodies aren't machines. They get tired, they rebel, they have their own timeline and their own wisdom. They force us to slow down even when we don't want to. They break down because they're alive, complex, and feral. In times like these, I'm reminded that my body is its own being with wisdom and a deep, primal Knowing that my mind can only scratch the surface of.
What I might perceive as a limitation can actually have the potential to open up and be a blessing, maybe even leading to some of my greatest insights or breakthroughs. "When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality," writes Chödrön. Sometimes it is only when things fall apart that we can put the pieces back together in more creative ways, perhaps ultimately leading to something even more beautiful than before.
This reminds me of our limitation to imagine possibilities outside of our current conception or understanding. What I mean by this is when we are dreaming a future into being, for example, we are often afraid to loosen our grip or even fully let go of our current circumstances, despite the fact that there very well could be something much better for us out there. Because we can't fully grasp it yet, it feels safer to hold tightly to that which we know than to release and hold out our hands, ready to receive something else. I'm reminded of this constantly now as I continuously ask the universe, "What is this for? What lessons does this experience hold for me?"
I've spent the last days deeply attuned to the flowers that grow and are currently in full bloom here in Brandenburg, to the bumblebees, wasps, butterflies, and the many other insects that fly between them. A world alive and humming with life.
In the last weeks, I've not been drawing, but today I spent a few hours drawing in my sketchbook (with my non-dominant hand) in the garden of the place where I'm staying. At first, there was a lot of frustration and a big wall of annoyance as my inner critic tore apart every mark I made and used it as further fuel for self-pity. But eventually I eased up, and when I did was enveloped by a childlike joy and freedom. Just me and my left hand, in a fist like a three-year-old learning to write for the first time. I made gleeful marks with my coloured pencils and felt pockets of ease and freedom.
In the art world, there is a lot of rhetoric around limitation as a tool for deeper creative expression, whether that is limiting a color palette or using some other limitation, like drawing or painting with your non-dominant hand to support a more interesting outcome. This kind of limitation can be fun sometimes as an occasional exercise, but it's taking on a whole new shape now that it's my only option. There is difficulty that comes along with this, especially when working in a slower medium like coloured pencils. I'm curious to see how this way of working will be when I'm back in my studio and have access to larger surfaces and different materials and wet media, like oils.
I'm still sitting here in this beautiful garden, listening to the crickets. There's something about summertime in this part of the world that makes me think of my childhood and the film The Sound of Music. I was unsure whether to share this random thought, but when we're going through periods of emotional upheaval I believe that small messages from our unconscious are more likely to bubble up, and are often imbued with wisdom (and likely not random at all). I've been thinking about a moment in the film where Maria is about to leave behind her sense of comfort and stability for another, different life. She says something like: “When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window." This line keeps resurfacing in my mind, repeating quietly. Cheesy as it might sound, there is a comfort to the visualization it offers me. Setbacks can often redirect us toward realities we couldn't see before, whose possibilities were always there but just outside our field of vision.
Right now, all I can do is surrender to my circumstances and allow myself to fully be in them. It's not just one grand moment of surrender, though, it's millions of tiny micro moments: I release this too. I accept this too.
I'm not sure what's to come for me and my hand in the coming weeks and months. I'll get some x-rays done when I’m back in Stockholm, and hopefully, along with them, more insight into what's going on. Until then, I'll be here learning to draw again, not as a professional or artistic tool but as a form of self-preservation. Gently reminding myself, each time I realize I’m staring at that closed door again, to look about me for a window instead.