One hour, one page

Every meeting I went to, I drew. One drawing, start to finish, for the length of the meeting, one hour. And when the hour was finished, I titled it with whatever topic that meeting had been primarily concerned with.

So that's what each of these is: one hour, one room, one topic - 122 of them.

I'm in recovery, and in 2017 I was drawing - a lot - and going to a lot of meetings. Drawing is how I listened. People tend to assume a moving pen means the attention is somewhere else, and for me it was the other way round. My hands stayed busy so the rest of me could stay in the room. I listened, I shared, I participated in every meeting. Each page is an experience I lived.

I never picked the subjects. The topic was whatever the room landed on that day, and I wrote it along the bottom of the page at the end. That's why the titles read the way they do - acceptance, gratitude, honesty, change - 80 subjects across the year, and the ones that keep coming back are the ones someone kept needing to talk about.

It happened 122 times between 9 April 2017 and 28 November 2017, though 7 of the pages never got dated.