a place to make meaning of what's beneath, around and in-between...
... beginning with the story of a SoHo bee sting! 🐝
But first! Hi, and welcome to small reliefs, a new it's-not-a-newsletter written by me (Amanda) for you (my friends and family) and also, frankly, for myself.
I cannot remember the last time I've exercised a consistent creative writing practice, and that ends (begins?!) with this dispatch.
So, what is small reliefs?
It's a place for me to reflect on the ordinary and extraordinary moments of everyday life, and to share more of them with people I love and admire. The name is a nod to relief printing, an art form that inverts our typical understanding of design to make images from the negative spaces revealed as we cut away at the surface. I took a series of linocut printmaking classes earlier this year (the boxer Virgen was my very first) and was immediately mesmerized by the meditative practice of carving an image in reverse, edge by edge, little by little.
Linocut printing requires me to interrogate perception, to turn my understanding inside out in search of clarity that isn't immediately apparent. That is what this space will be: tiny exercises in relief, a place to dig deeper or simply appreciate the shape of things as they are revealed to me, to navigate edges and boundaries, and to indulge in creativity for the sake of creating.
It will also be a place to share occasions for actual relief — big and small — amid the daily onslaught of work deadlines and distressing headlines. Life is as heavy as it has ever been, and while I don't anticipate bringing that heaviness here as a rule, I won't avoid it, either.
I am not advertising this newsletter publicly for the most part, and I'll aim to send it once a week (lol, we'll see about that). If you would rather not receive these, no worries! Simply reply and let me know (I promise my feelings will not be hurt) or hit unsubscribe in the footer of this email.
Finally, many thanks to my sweet friend Amalia for encouraging me to think of goals as "micro-commitments" we can break down into smaller steps like this one, and to several others of you (Carla! Candice! Jane!) who've modeled what a consistent creative writing practice can look like without all the pressure of performance. I'm grateful for your friendship and example.
Now onto my the first of many small reliefs.
about a bee
As many of you know, I’m allergic to bees — an unwelcome reactivity that I developed at the age of 28. It happened with an absent slap to the back of my leg as I sat on a picnic table, chatting with my brothers outside a cabin situated a couple hundred feet off the bouldered banks of the Frio River in the Texas Hill Country.
The sting was a mere annoyance at the end of an otherwise triumphant week celebrating my dad’s 79th birthday.
You see, the Zamora siblings — then five — were rarely together aside from weddings and funerals, all of us having left home by then for jobs or school or just plain distance (we Zamora children can crave our distance). The last funeral I had attended was our sister Letitia’s, which happened all too suddenly more than 3,000 miles away. Sadly, that was a distance most of my family members couldn’t manage.
That next summer was a chance to reconvene for happier reasons, to celebrate each other and our father.
That everyone managed to make it work with their schedules — two of my brothers were negotiating their time away down to the wire — was truly a miracle! What could a little bee do to mar such a historic event?
By the time I packed my bags and boarded a plane back home to Washington, DC, the sting had morphed from a pencil eraser of a welt to a small but growing fist. By the time I got home, I could barely peel my jeans off, my leg had swollen so much. The next day, I landed in urgent care with a thigh that I thought was surely about to burst, it had become so inflamed and infected. Congratulations to me, I had become severely allergic to the industrious, beautiful bee!
I have carried an EpiPen ever since, but can happily report — that until last month — I’ve only been stung only one other time and have never had to use it. And I certainly didn’t have it as I took a work call on a recent trip to New York City, chatting intently on a park bench in SoHo as something brushed against my exposed right ankle.
“Oh my God, I just got stung by a bee. I’M ALLERGIC TO BEES,” I said over the phone.
“Go, go, go take care of yourself,” my friend Liz said.
We were so deep into this conversation and I was determined to finish the call, but within five minutes, I could tell that I was not any more immune to bees than I had been 15 years before. I needed to get Benadryl and an EpiPen ASAP. So I wrapped the call and frantically called my husband to tell him what happened, then set off limping through the streets of SoHo to find the closest CVS minute clinic (just a half mile away, thankfully).
I will spare you the details — it was not my most sophisticated walk through SoHo! — but I made it to the Minute Clinic and after some back and forth with customer service, an urgent care MD who’d taken a longer-than-expected lunch break and a very kind man who let me take his place in line, I got my EpiPens (declined an ambulance, good grief) and booked a Lyft back to my hotel in the Financial District, exhausted and annoyed. I didn’t feel myself having a systemic response, so that was good. I just needed to keep the Benadryl going and the swelling down so that I could make my flight home the next day.
I am proud to report that I did NOT have to make another trip to urgent care or the emergency room. I made it back to Austin and iced that sucker down for the rest of the weekend, alternating doses of Benadryl, Advil and Tylenol.
What a wonderfully anticlimactic end to this bee sting story, dear reader! What a boring, drowsy conclusion! You see, the grist of this story wasn’t in the sting, but in my body’s response to it.
The me who left the Frio River with a swollen, angry leg was also reeling in grief, without the tools and resilience needed to tolerate the sting of a bee, a breakup, an overdrawn bank account, or a string of transgressions unchallenged, unpunished and unresolved.
If the Frio sting was asking me to pay better attention to the things beneath the surface that needed tending to, I couldn't help but see the SoHo sting as an indicator of my growth and healing since. I was ecstatic not to have to make yet another trip to urgent care — that I was able to muddle through the pain with the tools within my reach to effectively manage my body’s response. That I was able to interrupt the swelling before it became too much to handle.
Having spent much of the last 15 years working to heal trauma and rewire my relationship to self, others and the world, this sting felt like such a beautiful reflection of the resourcefulness I've been working so hard to cultivate.
So that's my first relief of small reliefs: a reminder that small struggles can reveal bigger graces, if we are open to seeing them. Here’s to the stings that call us to pay more attention to what needs tending, and to the ones that show us how much stronger we’ve become! 🐝💪
relief of the week
Mine came from screaming at the top of my lungs with a few friends and dozens of other Austinites. Where are you finding relief these days? I'd love to hear from you.
That's it for the first edition of this little experiment. Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you have a wonderful week!
xo / az