Barry Lee uses colorful, playful characters to encourage self care, reflection and community building in their new ‘Gentle Reminders’ journal. (Photographs by Dustin Timbrook)
A pressure-relieving tube protruded from Barry Lee’s skull the day their partner visited the hospital with an early test printing of Gentle Reminders, the Atlanta illustrator’s dazzlingly colorful oracle deck. The couple shuffled the cards, drew one at random and were stunned by the ironic timing.
“Little moments of decompression can help cultivate expansion!” read the card, accompanied by a pink character releasing a burst of smiling stars from a hole in the top of their head.
“That is the exact practice of an oracle deck,” Lee said. “What comes out if you just randomly pull a card and you receive that? I realized that reminders were about to become much more important to me than I thought.”
The emergency brain surgeries that resulted in that serendipitous moment in 2022 had a 50% chance of ending in permanent memory loss. Fortunately, Lee recovered with their cognition intact and a newfound focus on remembering — inspiration that animates the artist’s latest creative endeavor, the Gentle Reminders Journal.
Published by Em & Friends, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, the volume is a collection of Lee’s illustrated “reminders” — aphoristic suggestions — paired with writing prompts for journalers. What it isn’t, Barry clarifies, is a “prewritten guide on how to be in relationship with yourself.”
“I feel that a lot of guided journals are solely focused on self-care when we really should be focusing on collective care and how we care for each other as a society.”
To address this concern, Lee broke the journal into three sections: “Tending to Ourselves,” “Tending to Each Other” and, significantly, “Tending to our Futures.”
“I really wanted to have folks consider the future,” Lee said. “I think things feel really hopeless right now, and that’s by design. Journaling holds so much possibility. It holds so much hope. And as things continue to get intense in our world, we need to be able to have a record of what is still possible. We need to be able to have a record of what was possible in case those things no longer become possible.”
This act of balancing tender encouragement alongside clear-eyed honesty is consistent throughout Lee’s work. Their illustrations evoke childlike wonder with vibrant colors, soft shapes and friendly figures who beckon narrative interpretation. Similarly, the language of Lee’s reminders is, well, gentle. But the book is no collection of self-help cliches. Lee encourages journalers to view their circumstances, even painful ones, with frank clarity.
“I really wanted to do something that was anti-affirmation because I feel that affirmations can be used as a tool of spiritual bypassing,” Lee explained. “I think there’s a lot of escapism in affirmation whereas there’s more reality in reminders. And so I really wanted to try to make a cohesive work that was rooted in reality instead of rooted in escapism.”
In particular, Lee is vocal about the inescapability of our bodies, encouraging readers to listen and respond to physiological messages accordingly. This emphasis on bodily discernment comes from Lee’s own lived experience.
“I grew up with a very rare syndrome that resulted in me having a lot of surgeries as a child, and so my life was constantly under medical surveillance. So when I was in my early to mid-20s, I really thought that I was done with medical interventions. I was sharing and making art about my experiences in the past tense, while avoiding aspects that were still going on in my body … I think because I’ve been so used to being in this disabled body that pain has always been a constant in my life, basically, that I didn’t know a threshold of what pain was concerning.”
That concerning threshold was crossed in 2022 after a series of increasingly severe migraines landed Lee in the ER, and doctors discovered their brain was bleeding due to an overlooked cyst. It’s a lesson they don’t want to forget or keep quiet about.
“The subdural hematoma almost killed me, and I’ve been slowly talking more about that. I have to be very gentle with how I talk about it because it can be misconstrued as a way to just say ‘Oh, they overcame so much.’ It’s like, no. I’m still actively disabled. I haven’t overcome anything necessarily. I’ve just learned how to be in my body.”
Ideas about self-preservation and boundary setting come up often in Gentle Reminders, but the journal doesn’t dwell on endless introspection. Instead, Lee employs these self-reflective inquiries as launchpads for thinking about how we engage with others and build community.
“So much of disability narratives are very individualistic. And I really want to encourage more people to consider their role in how they show up in community and in the world with other people. Oracle decks and journals are used very traditionally as ways to focus just on yourself. I wanted to move beyond that, to focus on how we show up for each other and how we show up in our future. That is something very important to me.”
Gentle Reminders Journal is available now at independent bookstores and online through Hachette Book Group.
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Dustin Timbrook is a creative generalist working in art, film and music. He volunteers on the board of directors for Avondale Arts Alliance. Timbrook loves spending time with his family, playing with dogs and gardening.
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