Ritual Mapping: Thursday, January 28, 2021

Built with Procreate and Figma

Thursday, January 28, 2021

I chose this day because I knew it would be an emotional rollercoaster of a day. To begin with, it was a full moon, which always throws off my sleep schedule and tends to heighten my emotional and intuitive sensitivity. Strangely, or significantly, all of the women in my family say the same thing — that they “couldn’t sleep a wink” because of the full moon. This set up the day for me not only to be more sensitive, but also to be tired, which tends to exaggerate my emotions as well.

My partner and I had online couples therapy scheduled, which we’ve now been attending for about a year (this is the one Catholic marriage ritual I agree with — the Catholic Church insists that couples attend counseling before getting married.) While our sessions are somewhat routine at this point, they always involve digging deeply into our emotions and communication styles.

I also knew we had an intensive Zoom meeting planned with my best friend and her boyfriend. My best friend of ten years is involved in a relationship that I view as emotionally abusive in many ways. There was an incident back in July 2020 in which her boyfriend attempted to treat me in the way that he treats her, fabricated a lie about the event, then began harassing and bullying me to the extent that my partner and I had to ban him from our home. Since initial attempts to reach out and fix the situation (I’m a Gemini — I can’t help but want to bring issues out into the open and fix them as soon as possible), I haven’t spoken to my friend’s boyfriend for six months. Finally, he reached out to me and asked if we could schedule a time to all discuss what happened and find a way to move forward. This meeting went as well as it could have and resolved some lingering issues, however it was difficult to navigate such a personal conflict with as much composure as possible.

Since there were so many key moments of stress throughout the day, I made sure to engage in as many calming, decompressing activities as I could. This meant cutting down on work time, taking a nap, doing yoga, making love, playing video games, playing chess (something my partner and I have gotten really into since watching The Queen’s Gambit), eating homemade, nourishing foods like carnitas, salad, and gnocchi with pesto, and drinking tea (which turned into a hot toddy when I poured a well-deserved shot of whiskey into my tea).

Unavoidably, I did end up crying at one point: when the song “I Did it My Way” by Frank Sinatra played on the Umbrella Academy soundtrack. This was the song played at my dad’s funeral and it never fails to trigger me. At that point in the day, I was exhausted and tapped out emotionally, so it was one of those good, therapeutic cries rather than an ugly, joyless one. Afterwards, as is my habit, I lit a fire in the fireplace to sit by while I played guitar. Growing up in the mountains, fires are calming and familiar to me. They’re warming from the outside in, and, when combined with an acoustic guitar (the instrument I’ve played around campfires since the age of 14) allow me to clear my mind and relax. I ended up falling asleep in front of the fireplace and was later woken up by my partner and, finally, went to bed.

Design Process

I started with a pencil and paper record of my day. As you can see in the below sketch, the times and even the month and year are incorrect. I attribute this mostly to being exhausted and focusing more on jotting down emotions and moments rather than accurate numbers. Going back through my phone records and talking with my partner, I corrected the times for the final sketch above.

I drew my personal “User Journey Map” of the day in Procreate, using a linear but somewhat chaotic time progression, indicated by track marks. In my mind, this is a more accurate method of mapping one’s day. While the hours may progress linearly, an especially emotional day often feels winding and disordered, looping backward and forward to key feelings and significant moments. After I finished the sketches in Procreate, I uploaded them into Figma (an online Prototyping software), and added in the map key and text describing the key moments throughout the day.

To indicate emotional inputs, I first planned to graph my day in a sort of line chart, but decided that the winding, curving nature of the day called for an additional, color-coded iconography — somewhat like an emotional heat map. Some moments are bi-colored or even tri-colored, indicating a range of emotions that occurred during that time. In spaces which have “Ritual Potential,” I placed stars. While I used to have full and dark moon rituals, those have dropped off with the demands of graduate school, relationships, and jobs. I would like to have more of a ritual around the moon cycles, as well as rituals around sleeping and eating — two things that I tend to not be so great at maintaining a schedule for. What I consider “rituals” are indicated by another layered symbol that denotes how I envision ritual engagements: spirals. These are the acts I engage in again and again, imbued with meaning because they bring me awareness or presence in some way. Whether it’s painting my face with makeup, maintaining a breathing pattern while in a yoga position, or watching the dancing flames in our wood-stove, these are the moments in which I tap into that liminal space that connects me to other worlds and other times.