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Not being an artist, I knew I’d have to hire one to illustrate each card in the Mixed Emotions deck (there are 60). At the time, a friend of my former husband’s was just beginning to represent an artist who appeared to be quite talented. Though I had misgivings about working with him, I convinced myself that what was best for Mixed Emotions wasn’t necessarily what was best for me.
The contract with the artist was set up in a way that enabled him to receive a monthly income while dedicating himself fully to my project for a year. Over time, it became more and more evident that he wasn’t going to deliver. By the time I finally pulled the plug, I’d paid him more than $50,000, which, of course, I never got back.
I learned a couple things:
- When I have misgivings about something, I don’t talk myself out of them anymore.
- I needed to be the one to determine how each card was illustrated, not the artist. Which means that I needed to tell the artist what grief looks like. I needed to tell the artist what exhaustion looks like, and so on.
- To do that, I’d need to brainstorm with a very creative group of friends. More on that later.
I still feel sick to my stomach when I think about losing that much money. Imagine how I must feel writing about it.
*
Embarrassed. Really, really, really embarrassed.
May this cautionary tale, and the very existence of Mixed Emotions, prevent you from making the same mistake.
*Kris Wilste’s illustration for the “Embarrassed” card from the Mixed Emotions deck.
When I was 28, I traveled behind what was then the Iron Curtain with friends. You know the part in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy & Co. enter Oz, and the movie changes from black-and-white to color? Well, crossing the border between West and East Germany was exactly like that, only backward. Everything became gray and colorless, and it seemed like we went back in time about 40 years.
We stayed with several families there–people that my friends had met through their church. Sitting at their kitchen tables behind the Iron Curtain enabled me to confirm that Sting was right. The Russians (or in this case, the East Germans) really did love their children, too. They experienced joy, grief, and fear just like I did. And a Berlin Wall in my own heart came tumbling down.
That’s when I realized that our emotions are a universal language. No matter where we live or what language we speak, what we feel is exactly the same. And that makes us One.
Kris Wiltse’s illustration for the “Loving” card from the Mixed Emotions deck.
When I was in my thirties, words were my trade. I was good at expressing things–especially technical things. Yet, I found myself sitting across from a therapist, perplexed by the question she had just asked, which was: “How do you feel about that?”
I was tongue-tied. How could it be so difficult to put my feelings into words? And I found myself wanting to cheat. What I needed was a list of feelings that I could choose from whenever she asked me that question. But a list alone wasn’t enough, I needed each word on the list to be movable. Maybe it needed to be something like emotional Magnetic Poetry or emotional Scrabble or, maybe it could be cards.
Hey, cards. Now there’s an idea.
So, I created a deck of cards to help people put their feelings into words. It’s called “Mixed Emotions,” and I’ll be writing a whole lot more about what I learned, and the mistakes I made in later entries.
