Feel Something, Make Something: A Guide to Collaborating with Your Emotions

An  intimate, quietly revolutionary guide to using art to process,  understand, and collaborate with your feelings, from the co-author of My Body, My Home.

Understanding  our emotions is a lifelong process. Many of us were taught to avoid,  suppress, or run away from intense feelings like grief, anger, and  sadness. What if, instead of hiding from your emotions, you collaborated  with them?

Feel Something, Make Something is  a guide to experimental, creative self-expression and reflection.  Caitlin Metz believes that making art—whether it’s a detailed scribble  on a crumpled receipt or a 100-day series of photos—gives your feelings a  physical form and provides space to observe them from a distance. To  help kickstart your creative process, Metz offers tutorials on  zine-making (complete with a pull-out DIY zine to keep in your wallet),  drawing, bodymapping, mindmapping, self-portraiture, and writing  personal manifestos.

This act of creation can be a form of  release, documentation, ritual, conversation, or disruption. You may  choose to sustain your feeling, to channel it into your work, or to  shift it completely. To feel something and make something is both an  invitation to take a breath and an opportunity to shift your  perspective.

Feel Something, Make Something is not about making perfectly polished works of art. The outcome of your art-making is arbitrary. The process is the work.