Do you ever have those days where you feel like a very small animal in a very big world? I think of them as my Piglet days, and when I drink tea out of my Piglet mug it fortifies me greatly, but those feelings still lurk under the caffeine bravado.

Sometimes they’re brought on by something specific — a comment someone makes, something I’ve read, something I’ve seen. Sometimes they just seem random, coming with the rain or just out of the blue. My Piglet moods never last for more than a few days, replaced by my more usual quiet, easy Pooh bear moods, taking one thing at a time and not worrying too much unless the cupboard’s low on honey.

This week’s a bit of a Piglet week for me — I’ve been reading a book with a lot of art processes alluded to in the fiction, things I’ve never had the chance to learn about. I feel a bit of a fraud when I read about people working and working on their art, day in and day out, learning new ways of seeing, new ways of using light and color, glazes and washes and underpaintings. I never learned any of those things, really, and I always just feel lucky to have remembered to use light at all, let alone tried to do so in a way that would make someone remark upon its uniqueness, for instance.

But I keep painting anyway, trying to hang on to the inspiration that also comes with the Piglet feelings, to give my inner Piglet lots of warm bear hugs and tea.

New web technology gives me this feeling sometimes, too. I was a coder, once, back in the mists of time, and let me tell you, I hated it even when I was good at it. So whenever web design starts to slide further and deeper into coding, I get the heebie jeebies and want to back away. But then someone wants something from me — or I want it from myself — and I fall right back into those Piglet feelings. Even though I know I made a conscious choice to move in this direction, it’s hard to remember why it matters when faced with all the things that I not only don’t know about web coding, but don’t particularly want to have to know.

The best solution I’ve found for code-related Piglet is to find him a nice Rabbit to work with, who knows just what to do and how to do it. Well, plus tea and bear hugs.

I’ve mostly soothed Piglet’s worries about Woozles, though sometimes it slides more into Eeyore for a day or two before Pooh takes back over. Today I raise my mug and set the Woozle worries aside to work on projects for happy clients, projects for myself, and just being me.

And that’s the very best thing for a bear to do, even one with a Piglet lurking inside.