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.