Hello and happy April! The last update I had for you was in November soo it has been quite some time and a lot has happened since. Here's a long windy newsletter of what I've been up to during these odd winter months, some serious redirecting I'm doing in my life, and a few 2026 projects that I'm excited about. Thanks in advance for reading my rambles <3

Quick recap: In December I went to Turkey for a month, in January I started vlogging and then immediately got overwhelmed with editing, in February I had some health scares, and now, in March, during the weirdest Ramadan I have ever experienced, I have decided to leave my job (yikes but yay?)

Let's start with some illustrations I started making back in October. I decided I needed some whimsy in my life to avoid the seasonal depression that hits every year right after spooky month, spoiler I was only successful for that month alone and descended very quickly after. The best way I could think to attempt this was to do a 30 day drawing challenge. It had been too long since I started any new art/crafting project so I gave myself the most realistic challenge I could, a prompt a week for the whole month. One of those prompts was vaguely zines, (which are mini little magazines that you can make with folded paper, and spread around info accessibly, or make funky art). I made 4 zines in total and one of them was entirely book themed. I called it Books I Read in 2025, the first page was a summary of how many books and comics I read in the year, the next few pages were each book title listed out under the months I read them, and at the end I drew 7 squares to fill in my favorite books' covers (why 7 and not 5 or 10? No idea.) I can share the full zine as well as the other prompts in another post, but for now here's the spread:

The King Must Die by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The River has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron

I definitely want to make another one of these in 2026 and update it every few months. Honestly, taking the time to physically write out the titles of each book and then draw the covers of the most memorable ones just made my appreciation for illustrators and book designers even deeper. I also realized I really need to work on letter spacing.

After making these pages, I took a picture (probably should have scanned it properly but oh well) then put them in procreate to fixed up 2 of the covers that got screwed up. I used a combo of micron pens, acrylic, a white pen and watercolors to make these, and then a bunch of brushes on procreate to attempt to recreate The Bewitching cover and Of Monsters and Mainframes. I'm most proud of how The King Must Die turned out (the layers took so much patience). It genuinely took months to complete and they're not perfect and I could have tried to fix them all up, but it exists and I am quite proud of it. I will be doing more of this in 2026. Making zines. Share them around. Illustrating more. Get into a craft, any really. These are vaguely on the vision board.

But back to the letter. October and November were meant to be writing/drawing months and that kind of happened but it also kind of fizzled out. I found myself reflecting less in my journal, I wasn't even scrolling online like I usually do, instead I got sick of all content. All posts, all videos, all loud pronouncements of how people in power keep throwing humans into literal fire in pursuit of profit. I especially noticed this in November. I could count on one hand the amount of movies/shows that kept my interest. I switched to youtube, thinking that some reliable channels I've always watched would keep me going. My algorithm has always gravitated towards: video essays, media analysis with a sociological perspective that really makes me consider the media I engage with, short indie animations, illustrator's vlogs, art studio tours, sketchbook videos, and content around crafting and making art. But none of it was interesting to me. I was going through it in my personal life, my work life was feeling overwhelming, and my health wasn't getting much better. Add the seasonal depression on top and this constant feeling that as a creative/daughter/human being I was simply not doing enough, and it was a perfect recipe to send me right over the edge. I deleted the apps. I genuinely began to seek refuge in my diary. Sometimes, when everything around gets so loud the noise is intolerable, the only decision is to lean into that feeling rather than feign apathy. I let myself feel everything and what my body was screaming at me was that I was on the verge of breaking. So I decided to give myself a rather expensive life detour, a flight to Istanbul, Turkey.

Now, I'm not really the type to book plane tickets for halfway across the world on a whim, but I can not stress enough now much I needed answers. When you experience a constant hum of chronic pain and doctors have only given you ways to manage the pain until another flair up, it becomes an exhausting cycle. The trip didn't come out of nowhere, I just didn't think I would be planning for it in just a few short weeks. It was instinctual to make the choice. I was lucky enough to have been living at home, saving for a trip like this all year, and so I made the choice. I had many logistics calls with doctors, I had to figure out how to pack for a month away, and I ended up booking a one way. I wasn't sure if I wanted to come back immediately. I wasn't sure of anything. I was still working the first 2 weeks I was there (remote work life post 2020 must be studied), but I was also back at the Hagia Sophia I had visited 2 years before. Back in that historic city full of cats, other tourists, craftsman, artisans, and people of all walks of life. For most of my time there, (after tests and medical information flooding my brain) I gave myself permission to just exist elsewhere. It was the gift of presence that somehow has become really rare in this day and age. The gift of taking a beat to breath and think on where my life had lead me.

It sounds very existential and honestly it was all of that, but it was also just me alone with my thoughts realizing I am not as afraid of a person as I thought I was. I just had to trust myself a bit more. If you ever get the opportunity to solo travel (or invite a friend to leave everything and come with you on a plane) I highly recommend it. I mean I was a wreck before I left and a complete tangle of nerves that didn't untangle till maybe 3 days of being there. Before hopping on a plan I thought of every negative scenario from my job letting me go for giving them such short notice, to imagining every travel snafu happening at once. The creeping fear of setting out on your own, stewing in doubt that it's the right decision, and yet doing it anyway. That's what a lot of my 20s have been. When all you hear around you are limiting thoughts and beliefs from a very young age, it's easy to believe the container you grew up in is the only space you can live in. This feeling is true for many of the Brown/South Asian/Muslim immigrant women that I have known. I am no exception. I mean add on the queerness and gender fuckery of it all and it really doesn't help with the stressful thought that I am not enough. Not bold enough, not doing enough, not independent enough, and the list goes on. But after those first few days of anxiety I eventually chilled the fuck out and enjoyed my environment. I took in as much as I could, walked absolutely everywhere, and thrifted a lot. I had a great time there, here's a few collages ft some pics I took from mosques, museums, buildings, random textiles, ferry sunsets, and deserts I ate there:

I have absolutely romanticized this place and time in my mind and for now, I'm good with that. There were bad moments, difficult days, low moments, etc.

But in all seriousness, I could write an entire post on just how the medical tourism industry is so scammy to Americans/Turkish people alike. Americans are going to Turkey for access to healthcare our country does not provide for reasonable prices and Turkish people who are seeing more foreigners in their healthcare space have to face longer waits in hospital hallways, and cleared out pharmecies as medical tourism only gets more popular.

I could make that post, but for now I'll leave it at this: Be a more conscious and ethical traveler by acknowledging your American privilege when you travel and to always leave a place better/ the same as you found it. There is no need to excessively take from a place you are visiting. Be open to learning and to being wrong and correcting yourself when you learn new things. Travel is great for breaking those internal rules we think are rigid and correct. I'm glad I went and that I have these memories. I am grateful that I got to see doctors that are too expensive for me here. I am really thankful that I have some more answers now. Not a complete solution, but at least steps in the right direction.

To travel, to take myself on trips, to really see the world, it has always been something I wanted to do. I have never felt more sure of myself then when I am traveling and able to see how I react, enjoy, and move in different environments. It just takes a step, then another, then one more to start that journey.

So I came back from Turkey in January. It really does feel like the moment I did I just saw one headline after the other that sent me reeling. From the murder of people on the streets by ICE agents to the ongoing dispossession of land in the West Bank as everyone's attention was scattered, to the continued deliberate starvation of Gaza. This year started off with a lot of heartbreak and targeted rage. I have never felt more sure than I do now that the world I want to live in is one I make through my choices on a daily basis. If you choose apathy, the world is only that. If you choose anger, anything can raise it out of you. If you choose joy, then you may just see a tiny bit of life growing in the cracks between the concrete for lack of a better metaphor.

I am grateful for the guidance and the levity and calls to action from the activists and leaders in my community and in the broader liberation movement that I see forming around the world. From October of 2023 to now I have seen working class people from every walk of life, every possible background at one point or another with varying degrees of intensity, answer a call from one strip of land and join in dissenting from the ruling class. It's been the most motivation and deeply upsetting thing I've ever seen in my life. The violence, apathy, privilege, powerlessness, and love all at once. What I hear the most these days is something along the lines of: "I see it now. I seen the violence, I recognize this is genocide, I know my own government is complicit in this violence, I didn't even know it was happening, but I know now. So how can we stop it? The war machine continues to run no matter how we protest and show up." Its what I hear the most from people who I meet at events, who comment on my videos, who post long graphics on social media in hopes to find one other person that feels the same. But we all feel powerless. We all are seeing it and not making any changes in our own lives to try something different. A question that comes up for me is, do the people from the top to the bottom that keep the war machine fed and running without interruption feel this at all? Or do they believe they are simply doing their job. If the entire systems runs on this violence, then how can we keep functioning within it and expecting any change?

No individual has answers, that's part of this. You are alive. I am alive. As we watch constant death and feel this collective trauma, it is causing a dissonance in our society between our actions and our true thoughts. Decolonizing your mind and waking up to the horrors of this empire leads to a reckoning. It can often lead to a very righteous anger. I argue that even the apathetic are the same way. Instead of injustice causing them to rise to angry or fear or to fighting, your body finds a way to protect you from the rising dread. It becomes disaffected. I know it to well because I've fallen into it for many months at a time. This fist clenching instinct to protect your heart so you feel nothing at all. You numb it instead. I think that's probably what best describes the beginning of this year. The recognition of apathy within me and this new seed I've planted to hope again. To dream again. To feel life in all of its pain/joy so that I can be a part of the movement that is only growing with time. The movement that inspired me once.

If you're still here and read this far, thank you for sticking around as I get this out! I promise the summer newsletter will be vastly different. I was really going through it the last few months and I am really am trying to dig deep and look back. This letter is for you of course to read and maybe feel inspired by, but it's also for me to have and to just remember. February was a strange one. I had stopped taking some new medication (definitely don't recommend doing things like that <3) and of course, started to feel worse. I was trying to find a schedule for myself to balance my life out again and was just failing miserably. I got off of tiktok, Ramadan began, and I came to the decision that it's best I don't fast this year. It was a choice for my health, but it was also extremely hard to do. I have fasted every year of my life since I was 12. Not fasting felt very unnatural. Instead, I had the most spiritually odd Ramadan of my life. But it was a good odd. I read a lot, thought a lot about my life, participated in the trans rights readathon which coincided with the last 10 nights of Ramadan (the holiest nights of the month) and finally made a choice that I honestly should have made back in January.

I deliberately do not talk about my work online as it is entirely unrelated and I didn't get my job through any of the social media work I've done. But I work in publishing. I am an editor and for over a year I have worked in non-fiction and children's books. This spring I made the choice to leave my current hybrid-publisher and taking a few months to focus on my health. In the meantime, I am will be doing some freelance work to get me through the next few months. I also plan to be more active in the spaces that fuel my creativity like this page and youtube. I am just ready to try the things I like again. I am ready to trust myself. This year, that's all I want. To sincerely trust and try out the things that scare me. To find my creative path again and to try new things.

Other updates:

• 2026 goal: GET MORE WHIMSICAL NOW

• I now have a vlogging camera ! It's my first sony and I am very excited to start filming with it.

• I am starting a zine with my sisters ! We'll be using substack to post about it and print physical copies that will soon be a tier here in bindery. Stay tuned for the next newsletter for links and such.

• The book club is well on it's way this year. This month we're reading a comic by Iasmin Omar Ata called Wallflower ! You can join the chat on discord which is linked at the top of my page.

• I will be posting about this more at the end of the month, but I will announce here, I am now offering editing and sensitivity reading services ! Here's my media kit if you know of an author that would be interested in working with me this summer, send them my way. <3

Thanks for reading, I hope you're doing well these days, and I hope you're finding that whimsical thing in your life to keep you going.