Squiggle & Heart No. 7 - Revisited

My therapist and I were just a week or so ago talking about that feeling that perhaps never goes away, where we crave having our needs intuited and met without having to ask. Although I’m very proud of how much opportunity I have created for myself over the years, it gets exhausting, and often I feel a painful yearning for someone to just tell me what to do; tell me, even, what I need. As I stare down an empty remainder of the year professionally, and sit with that discomfort, it feels fitting that this cartoon is up for revisiting.

When I first created this piece back in October 2023, and posted it on Instagram, a friend asked me if I was ok. It took me by surprise, because I think this is just a natural state of consideration for humans, not something specific to an event - that there is a tiny creature inside us that remembers our infancy, and remembers when at least some of our needs were met without the need for language. Not all needs potentially, and fewer for some of us than others, but at least some have to have been intuited, or else we wouldn’t be alive currently to read this Substack.