This has been a tough year, not just because of politics, but mostly because my mum passed away. For anyone who’s lost a loved one, you know how hard it is. I recently dreamed that someone was saying how awful it must be when a parent dies. And in the dream, I said, “Yes, it feels like your heart is being ripped out of your body.” Not exactly poetic or reassuring…but that’s how it feels sometimes. One thing that has always helped me get through life is being creative, and it was the same way for my mum.

Starting at about age 10, when we moved from Scotland to America, I survived school by writing suspenseful stories in a spiral notebook during lunch. As I got older, I drew caricatures of the mean kids, giving them hideous giant teeth and noses. That was really cathartic!

I got the creative genes from my mum — she started out as a little kid drawing and making her own paper dolls. She planned to go to art college, but…well, let’s just say the art colleges back then in Scotland and England could be a bit snooty. She realized that she loved textiles and went to college for that instead. She learned industrial textile design, knitting, weaving, felting, dyeing… Throughout her life she never stopped learning. After living in the South, she learned rug hooking, punch needle, pastels, and so much more. She learned landscape design, how to paint “barn quilts” and in her last years, how to play the ukulele.

When she started getting sick, I kind of lost my interest in being creative — my brain was all used up from worrying about my mum. But one day last year, I found a book of pictures you could cut out to make your own collages.

Here’s my first collage from that book. The page already contained the fishbowl, just waiting to be filled up with ridiculousness…

After that, I was hooked! Making collages let me zone out the way writing stories had used to do, without the stress of worrying about getting it “wrong” and not sounding “literary” enough. I used the collage book for a while, but then the perfectly selected images started to get a bit boring.

I began cutting out pictures from old magazines and the free mags outside the library. I had an old canvas a friend gave me and painted it white and created a giant collage I’m especially proud of. After I made it, I realized it reminded me of the mountains in Western North Carolina; this happened to be around the same time that Hurricane Helene devastated that area.

My next source of inspiration? Comic books! I absolutely love comic books — the vivid colors, the insane illustrations, the melodrama! I started with some old comics I’d gotten years before, then moved on to buying cheap ones at the used bookstore. (I don’t mind cutting up comics if they’re only 35cents each.)

This “villains” collage was inspired by the 2024 elections… Ahem! As 2025 progressed, I learned that I could combine my love of collage with my love of recycling and my desire to write angry postcards to politicians. This realization came from a video on Instagram by The Simple Environmentalist, who demonstrates how to use empty food packaging to create free postcards!

When my mum passed away in June, I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep creating. But I found myself sitting back down at my desk, thumbing through the cutout pictures. It was easy to find ones that made me laugh. It was relaxing to glue them onto the cardboard and overlap a woman’s crying face with a dinosaur casually chewing plants. So easy to create a storyline without having to think.

One thing I learned from my mum in her last months was that it’s okay to create just to have fun. Until then, we’d always gotten caught up in, “Could we sell this? What would we use it for? Maybe you could teach a class in how to make this…” As she was able to do less and less, my mum focused on creating tiny watercolors of her garden. And they were beautiful.

Without knowing it, she gave me permission to keep creating my postcards when everything felt awful. In the “creative zone,” I forget everything else. I’m in my bubble, engaged. I’m not thinking about her being gone; I’m on a journey with Wonder Woman, Star Man, The Jaguar, and The Fantastic Four!