I thought about Adam a lot today.
Adam died almost ten months ago at the age of 39, a victim of the Canadian healthcare system. I miss him.
Last winter, I had the worst depression of my adult life, and it was both initiated and made far worse by his death. It was the kind of perverse irony my trauma brain excels at: I spent the winter with suicidal urges fueled by both missing him terribly and the guilt of knowing he’d have given anything for one more day.
Grief never comes alone.
It arrives as a jumble: absence, unspent love, and—most dangerously—anger.
Anger at the loss itself, and anger at the indignities layered on top.
When Adam died, his funeral home website was vandalized by pro-Palestinian activists to the point that the administrator had to disable the option to post condolences.
They weren’t punishing Adam—he was beyond punishment, beyond their virtue-signaling judgment. They were punishing his family and his friends, many of whom didn’t share his politics.
Their message was simple: because you disagreed with us, your grief is invalid, and we will mock you for mourning.
It was a secondary death. First the man, then the right to grieve him.
I felt the same dark echo when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Online, people celebrated. They mocked his widow’s grief. They continue to do so.
Some of this cruelty was performative—cosplaying as a psychopath to harvest likes.
This is the world we have created; psychopathy is now a career path.
Others were plainly sincere, doing it under their own names, in their own work uniforms, without shame. No disguise, no expectation of consequences.
That brazenness is what frightened me most.
Most psychologists concur that anger is a secondary emotion. If anger is the surface, fear is what lurks underneath: fear that we live in a world where cruelty is not only permitted but rewarded.
And what do you do with fear like that?
For me, the answer has long been to draw.
Drawing is where I put the stuff that has no place else to go. It doesn’t fix anything—there’s no Nobel Prize for “processing feelings with pencils”—but it keeps me from exploding.
On a related note—after my recent trauma-recovery retreat, I found myself returning to a childhood hobby: chess problems.
I was never much of a player, but I became a skilled (well, for a kid) problemist.
A chess problemist is someone who composes or solves puzzles that start from an arranged position—say, a scattering of pieces on the board with the stipulation “White to move and mate in two moves.” The point isn’t to play out a full game but to set up or unravel a miniature puzzle where the solution is forced, elegant, and self-contained.
Composing and solving problems was its own discipline. You didn’t need to be a strong competitor to find beauty in a forced mate or to create one.
What it offered was mastery without having to master everything. Control in a bounded space. Games were messy and unpredictable; problems were self-contained universes where clarity and resolution were possible.
Drawing has become the adult version of that for me. It doesn’t make me “good at art” in some competitive sense any more than problemism made me good at chess.
What it does is give me a place to metabolize feelings too big to leave unstructured.
Fear, anger, grief—they’re the messy games. Drawing is the problem set: bounded, solvable, mine.
That was the frame in my mind when someone commissioned me to draw Charlie Kirk and asked me to sell prints.
At first, I hesitated. It felt weird, morally gray, distasteful. Wasn’t it arguably wrong?
After consulting a few wise elders, I came down on the side of: no. Different in vibe, maybe, but not in moral category. I had already written about him, without hesitation, here on my monetized Substack—and so had every other content creator with a mic and a blog. (My small-picture take is here and my big-picture take is here.)
If it’s acceptable to talk about Kirk and get paid, it’s acceptable to draw him and sell prints. The prints only felt different.
And to my pleasant surprise, the act itself was therapeutic. Drawing Kirk—attempting to show his basic good nature and courage—absorbed anger instead of amplifying grief. It gave me a channel for fear I otherwise had nowhere to put.
It made me smile in a way drawing Adam cannot yet do. Every time I try Adam, I still cry too hard to finish. But I’m not crying now, writing this, and that’s something. For me, that counts as progress.
That’s the strange alchemy of art.
It can metabolize the anger and fear tied to public events, when the cruelty comes from strangers and the wound is historical.
So here we are.
Prints of the Charlie Kirk drawing are now on sale. I gave them a special price so they’re $40 with shipping (USPS priority) included.
The person who commissioned the drawing paid me for a high-resolution scan and permission to make 30 prints of his own, leaving me with the original. If you’re interested in owning the original, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and make me an offer. It’s mostly graphite on Strathmore 400 Drawing paper, but the irises are colored pencil (Caran d’Ache Luminance) with a bit of white gel pen for highlights.
And if you see someone doing a counter-protest at an anti-Trump event passing them out, make sure you go tell him that you know where he got it! (My understanding is that they’ll be given to people brave enough to participate at a “Change My Mind” table at a counter-protest.)
Think of them less as a tribute from a devotee—I wasn’t one, just a casual fan—and more as an artifact of what art can do with fear and anger. (That’s not easy to say, two weeks after his assassination, but it’s honest.)
If you want to see another artistic take, my dear friend
has a moving video tribute you’ll enjoy, especially if you saw this coming as far back as “punch a Nazi.”And if you think selling the prints is opportunistic—well, Charlie himself would have approved. Personal responsibility, entrepreneurial grit, clawing your way out of debt? He’d have called it character-building.
I just call it Thursday.
But in all seriousness, if you feel that way, I have sufficient theory of mind to understand where you’re coming from, and I hope you won’t buy one.
My other prints are available here.