Welcome or welcome back to Faccia Tosta: the Newsletter where I share my life as an illustrator, publishing industry insight and my creative process - all through the lens that most of what looks like talent from the outside is just someone with worse impulse control than you. You can unsubscribe whenever you like, but I’d rather you didn’t!

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This one’s going to be light on art and heavy on ‘capitalism is making us hate adulting, and we all just want to regress to an infantilised state’ - which I think is still relevant to everyone, artists or not.

My experience with trad wife content actually goes back further than six months. I first stumbled across soft femininity with a million kids baking bread in pretty aprons back in 2022, when I was pregnant with my first baby and went chasing positive unmedicated birth stories on YouTube (honestly, I was kinda addicted for a bit). I came for the home birth videos and stayed for the bread and house management tips.

I’m all for sourcing the best advice wherever I can find it: I’ll watch a motion graphics tutorial on a designer’s channel, and I’ll also listen to a woman with ten kids talk about systems that keep a household running, because that just seems like common sense. I don’t have to agree with her politics, her homeschooling choices, or Jesus. I just want to know how she cooks three meals a day for eleven people and still has all the hair on her head.

I don’t intend to have ten children - two is already feeling ambitious. There’s the constant sense of being out of time, out of money, always rushing, always wondering when the next job is coming in (freelance life, but honestly, parents with office jobs don’t fare much better, especially here in Italy, where most people leave their workplace at 6:30 pm). And even without kids, everyone I know my age is busy in that particular joyless way where you’re exhausted but also somehow still behind. We’re all tired, we’re all guilty, we’re all scrolling, but what’s the alternative if you want to remain barely functional as a member of society?

So yes, I can completely see the appeal of spending fifteen to twenty years just mumming. Baking your sourdough, homeschooling your seven children, and only focusing on that. I mean, I’d fucking love it.

Motherhood is tiring and alienating, but I think that’s mostly because you’re doing it on top of everything else. If I removed the job, the hobbies, the social obligations… I wouldn’t be stressed by it, because I wouldn’t be rushed. Looking after my kids, cooking, and cleaning would be both my work and my leisure at once, which is honestly a fantastic use of limited human resources.

And yes, having no time for books or opinions might sound like a loss, but there’s something almost aspirational about it right now. Commentators love pointing out that the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ aesthetic is inherently infantilising for women. Yes, girrrl. That’s the appeal. How nice would it be to return to a point in life where the biggest decision you faced was picking basketball or volleyball as your sport elective at school? I do not want to be a sentient, informed adult in this particular timeline of the multiverse. It’s exhausting. Everything I read makes me furious, weepy, scared, or guilty (or all four at once). I would absolutely outsource my brain cells to a soft living pamphlet - yes, even if it comes with unfounded opinions on vaccines - if it meant living on a homestead completely unbothered by the rest of the world.

In the fantasy, you also don’t have money worries, because money is your husband’s department. Your job is to work within the budget, which is basically a management sim, and infinitely less stressful than worrying about your career trajectory while watching colleagues get treated badly or paid more. Take financial anxiety out of the equation, and you’ve already removed about half the weight.

Then your day is just practical things with immediate, visible results: clean the house, bake a loaf, batch cook, stroke your children’s beautiful blonde hair (dark brown in my case, but the content I watch skews very WASPy).

And look, I’m not saying being a stay-at-home mum is easy. I’m sure it’s knackering. But in the fantasy, it’s a good knackering, because you’re tired from looking after people you love, not from slaving away for a profit you’ll never see, or composing yet another email that’s professional enough to mask the fact that you’re absolutely seething.

That’s why trad wife content exploded, and to be clear, the right-wing propaganda not very subtly embedded in it is real, and it’s working, and it’s yet another thing we should be worrying about. But when reality is this relentless, the fantasy of opting out entirely, of narrowing your whole world down to bread and children and a pretty apron, makes complete sense.

Be honest, have you ever wished, just for a second, you could outsource your brain cells and emancipation rights to be able to hide in a patriarchal fantasy?

Hello and welcome to Faccia Tosta - the newsletter about my life as a freelance illustrator, the publishing industry, my creative process, the books I’m consuming, and the running thesis that most of what looks like talent from the outside is just someone with worse impulse control than the rest of you. I’ll try to be useful, but I do have a tendency to rant, so I’ll occasionally be insufferable. You can unsubscribe whenever, but I’d rather you didn’t.

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So, as I was saying, in January I fell into what the ancient Greeks considered the most grievous sin of all: hubris. Announcing how my year was going to be, without much more than hopes and vibes to go on. I guess, to my defence, I was trying to manifest, which I hear is all the rage now, but my manifesting powers flopped, and now I have to eat my words and my hat.

I’m not saying this to get sympathy comments; I just want to share my honest situation, which I think won’t be news to anyone in the illustration/creative field. For context, I used to work on roughly 20–24 projects per year, mostly funnelled through my agency. Roughly a third would be well paid and high profile, the rest filler to pad my income. I’d also get passive income from courses (Skillshare, TwoTap, other platforms) and sometimes private commissions or merch. But my biggest work funnel was definitely my agency.

When I made my vision plan for 2026, I decided that I was going to tackle the biggest problem I had, which was something that I’d been doing for years: working too much for too little (sounds familiar?). The simple reason why I’d been able to comfortably support myself is that I had been taking on an unreasonable number of projects, banking on my speed and ability to work over time (or overnight). But, with two young children (the youngest with no fixed childcare beyond us parents) I simply don’t have the hours anymore. Also, in any other job I’d be considered a senior, so I refused on principle to keep being paid like a junior. I told my agency I wouldn’t accept jobs paying less than €200/day (adjusted for the fact that you never work a full day on a single project when you’re freelance).

You know how many jobs I’ve been offered since then? Three. I got two of them.

(Oh, and one of those is actually way below the €200/day threshold, because when you’re not working at all, you have to start saying yes again 💁🏻‍♀️)

I don’t know if this is simply a reflection of how the kid lit market is faring in general, the sign that something was wrong with my agency specifically, or a ‘me’ problem - but 2 jobs in 5 months is obviously not enough to make a living.

So while this was supposed to be ‘the year I focus on my manuscripts’ while working on a few well-paid selective jobs (*still manifesting*), it quickly became: the year I scramble to find ways to use my illustration skills beyond the children’s book market and pivot for dear life.

It’s been wild. And it’s brought back all my worst ADHD-infused habits, including:

• starting so many new projects I genuinely forget about half of them within the week (hello Substack!)

• pitching my work relentlessly, often neglecting the paid work I should be doing instead

• living in the future and in my head way too much, forgetting about the real people and real life I am actually inhabiting

• horrid bouts of anxiety-fuelled insomnia

• making 457 plans in my head and following-through none of them

This is also why I’ve been all over the place with posting. I make a plan, look at it, and realise I have zero interest in following it - because a sneaky who even cares feeling has wormed its way into my resolve. It’s hard to post about the illustration industry or life as a freelance illustrator in a way that feels fun or catchy, when your days are a constant stream of ghosted emails and spec work just to secure a basic necessity: money.

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Few lines have stayed with me like this one from Bilbo in Fellowship: ‘I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.’ That’s exactly it. My brain is a cacophony of things I need to follow up on, pivots I haven’t tried yet (but wouldn’t that be a good idea), and the incessant noise of daily life - which includes a baby and a three-year-old sometimes literally screaming into my ear for hours.

It feels like poetic justice that I planned for a calm, intentional, low-stress year, and instead I’m having the most stressful and hectic one since I switched careers in 2017. I just don’t know what I’m being punished for.

Was the portfolio good? Not really. I got 3 replies out of 73. But one of those replies was from the agency that made me completely financially self-sufficient as an artist within two years of signing.

This is, genuinely, how I’ve built my career: not on talent, but on probability.

In Italian, we say faccia tosta, literally translated as ‘hard face’, but the meaning is more like audacity or chutzpah, or even, in some contexts, cheeky. To have a “faccia tosta” means to show up even if you’re not ready, haven’t studied for your exam or you don’t know anybody at an event. The worst thing that can happen is you don’t get the job, have to retake the exam, or look like a tool standing on your own by the canapes (been there, done that). My personality has always been 80% faccia tosta, to be honest, and in recent years, I’ve really started embracing it.

This newsletter is going to be about that, mostly. The illustrator’s life, the publishing industry, the creative process, the books I’m consuming, and the running thesis that most of what looks like talent from the outside is just someone with worse impulse control than the rest of you. I’ll try to be useful, but I do have a tendency to rant, so I’ll occasionally be insufferable. You can unsubscribe whenever, but I’d rather you didn’t.

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Here’s a framework I borrowed from a tech entrepreneur I once worked for: throw a little money at 10 ideas, see what happens. If even just one makes a gazillion pounds, it was worth it.

I don’t have money to throw at things. But I do have long-standing insomnia, an internet connection and a truly embarrassing willingness to send cold emails. So I adapted it: I plant a lot of seeds. Some grow, most don’t, but because life is uncertain and the future is chaos, this way I’m statistically less likely to end up with absolutely nothing in my basket.

Whenever I talk about my job, people often say something like “Ah, yes, but you’ve always been that kind of person”. As if there’s a certain type of human (special, fearless, somehow more legitimate than the rest) who gets to have an interesting career, and the rest are just spectators. I call this the Extraordinariness Gospel, and I think it’s mostly nonsense.

What I’ve observed is that plenty of people who are not the best in their field have amazing opportunities and make a living doing what they love (kudos to them), while plenty of extraordinary artists can’t pay rent despite being genuinely brilliant. The difference, a lot of the time, isn’t talent: it’s who was bold enough to try anyway, and tried often enough that probability eventually did its thing.

(Ok, a lot of the time it’s actually generational wealth and family connections. Entire careers spawned from being born in the right circles are real, and I won’t gaslight you about it, but for us normal people who don’t have the shortcut, boldness still outweighs talent)

But truly, and this is important, “the best” in any creative field is completely made up. There’s no absolute. There’s only scope, target audience, and personal taste. Which means the gap between you and the person who “deserves” the opportunity is probably much smaller than your brain is telling you.

Let’s go back to my seeds, and I’ll show you.

Last year, I was once again pregnant, and I knew that what passes for maternity leave when you’re freelance (working “a bit less” with a newborn strapped to your chest) would be better filled with quick brand deals than full publishing projects. Problem: I’d been ignoring my Instagram for three years. Toddler life and saying yes to literally every illustration job on the horizon (more on that later) will do that. So I focused on reconnecting with my audience, relearning my social media skills, and when my stats were looking okayish again, I started cold emailing brands.

My method, if you can call it that: I looked at the ads appearing in my own Instagram stories. If a brand was advertising to me, they were currently running a campaign. And if their algorithm thought I was their target audience… well, I was probably also their target creator. So I found 10 more brands in the same vein and sent them each a collaboration proposal.

The media kit took me half a day from a free template. I sent 10–20 emails each evening before bed. Most didn’t reply. But the ones that did accounted for a third of my income last year.

Most recently, I somehow ended up on the newsletter of a creator association called FiveTwoNine, and I obviously followed them on Instagram too. In February, I saw on their stories that they were official Adobe partners and were selecting creators to send to Adobe Creator Live in London, “Reply if interested”. I replied.

I had approximately zero expectation of being picked, but it takes 4 seconds to reply to a story, so I did. I got picked.

I can tell you the event wasn’t life-changing (I even had a minor panic attack while there, thank the goddess for Quiet Rooms), but it did give me two leads that may or may not turn into something real over the next few months. (More on that if they do.)

The through-line in all of this isn’t that I’m particularly brave, or strategic, or good. It’s that these opportunities have to go to someone, and that someone might as well be me if I’ve sent the email and most other people haven’t.

What I’ve learned from 30ish years of behaving like this is:

• Act on impulse, immediately. I pursue maybe 10% of the random ideas I have, and that’s the ideas I act on right there and then, before the hyperfocus fades and I talk myself out of it. If you wait for a calm, rational moment to do the scary thing, you’ll be waiting forever

• MVP everything. I do not wait until I have a perfect portfolio, a polished pitch, a finished product. I need a bare-bones minimum viable thing: an okay folio, a media kit from a free template filled in a couple of hours, a sketch that’s only a third properly rendered. The people on the other end are not grading you on the presentation. They’re asking: Is this interesting? Could this work? You can answer that question at 60% ready.

You don’t need to be extraordinary (almost nobody is). You only need to plant the seeds: most won’t grow, but fortunately, you only need a few.

With Love and Chaos,

memo

When I became a mother, I didn’t expect that one of the hardest adjustments would be learning how to handle my own desires. Motherhood isn’t just sleepless nights and endless laundry - it’s a retraining of your entire will.

Suddenly, what you want no longer exists on your own timeline. Everything is filtered through another person’s needs. If I wanted to do something, it wasn’t just a matter of carving out time - it was dependent on whether my child was calm, content, and settled. My own wants became secondary, postponed, or simply erased.

Hey! If you’ve enjoyed this article so far, consider subscribing! I talk about freelance life, illustration, motherhood as a barely adulting millennial, and many more things, all through the lens of someone who’s made an art of ‘just scraping by’ with faccia tosta.

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From Freedom to Fragmented Time

I don’t think it was always this way. My own mom, for instance, seemed to just do what she wanted, even with kids around. If she wanted a cigarette, she’d smoke one - even if she was babysitting. We’d simply exist alongside her desires. But for me, it’s been different. I find myself making sure my children are perfectly at ease before I even consider doing something for myself.

That shift brought anxiety with it. After my first child was born, I felt constantly needed - every cry, every feeding, sent my heart racing. It was overwhelming. As a freelancer, I’d been used to long stretches of solitude, time to draw or just be. Suddenly, solitude was gone. Starting anything creative felt pointless, because I’d probably be interrupted anyway.

Going from zero to one child broke me open. But interestingly, going from one to two has felt easier. Maybe because I’d already been “trained” to suppress my desires - or maybe because once you’re in the rhythm, you stop expecting life to bend around you.

Still, after almost three years, I can feel the cost. Suppressing your wishes day after day erodes your sense of self. And if you’re an artist, this loss runs even deeper. Creativity depends on knowing what you like, what you think, and what you want to say. But it also depends on having the time to ‘waste’: to wander from those starting points into the unknown, to follow tangents, to explore. That’s how you bring something back in the form of art. Without that space, making feels disorienting, like trying to grasp something you no longer recognise.

Why “Monothematic” Moms Aren’t Doing Anything Wrong

And to make things trickier, society often doesn’t make room for this reality. I recently read a Thread where someone was asking for advice on how to talk to her friend who’d just had a baby - because, she complained, the friend wouldn’t “talk about anything else.” The question was framed as if that was a failing.

It hit a nerve for me, because I’ve heard that before. A couple of years ago, my own brother made a dig at a family dinner: “So, when are you going back to talking about normal stuff on Instagram? You’re becoming monothematic with all this mum content.”

The thing is, it’s not that new mums don’t want to talk about other things. It’s just

that… what else is there? In the first months, especially, you stop watching films, you fall asleep three pages into a book, and you barely go out. The baby is your life. So when you ask about the baby, you are asking about her life. Pretending otherwise is like pretending half of her doesn’t exist. And honestly, it’s a little rude. If someone has just given birth, the kindest thing you can do is let her talk about it as much as she needs.

Turning Loss into Art

For me, being “mono-thematic” has actually become the only way I’ve been able to keep creating. Which is why my motherhood comics feel like a lifeline. They give me something concrete to make, something worth saying, rooted in the reality I live 24/7. And that feels grounding.

I think this struggle isn’t unique to me. It’s the invisible cost of care, especially for mothers. We talk about losing ourselves in parenthood, but what really gets lost are the small daily desires, the wishes and habits that make us who we are. Without them, it’s hard to know yourself. Without them, it’s hard to make art.

But maybe that’s also where new creativity begins: in the act of turning even the suppression, even the loss, into something worth expressing.

What about you - if you’re a parent, has parenthood taken away something from your creative life? Let’s overshare in the chat!