Doodles About Feelings

One day in August while at work, I was particularly frustrated about something. I went to visit my friend who sits at the opposite corner of our suite floor. I grabbed a thick black sharpie from his desk and scribbled a tangled mess of lines on a page of his legal pad. Bewildered, he asked me what I was doing.

“I’m drawing my feelings.”

We laughed about it and I walked away.

The next day, still frustrated about the same thing, I turned the page of his almost done legal pad and scribbled an ugly stick figure with an grossly over-sized head wearing a frown.

I did this a couple more times until his legal pad was filled and it dawned on me I could make this a daily routine and spend about 5 minutes to visit my friend during a work day and doodle. I love happy rituals in relationships and I enjoy filling up notebooks and journals. So I now have an established corner of his desk that houses my Doodles About Feelings sketchbook, colored pencils, an eraser and circle stencils. The project grew to two physical volumes of sketches that make us giggle when we flip through them and serves as another catalog of memories. I even started an instagram account for it.

Turns out there’s a lot of benefits to doodling. It can improve your memory and focus, provide another way to express yourself when your words fail you, and provide cheap comic relief to the mundane happenings in your everyday life. Read “The Power of the Doodle” for more about the benefits of doodling.

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Follow along on Instagram @doodlesaboutfeelings.