Racc Daily is my ongoing daily drawing project that’s celebrating its 5th anniversary in March 2026. It is a public visual journal that depicts the joys and pains of my life, but through this cartoon raccoon character. The main idea of the project is that I post a raccoon drawing on the project-related Instagram account every single day.

Currently, the project sits at a following of over 100 000 people on Instagram, which I’ve built organically over time. The reach of the project is an audience of over a million people a month. Whener I can, I use this coverage to promote values such as love, compassion and self care, as well as to promote the habits of open emotional expression and honest reflection.

When I started the project in March 2021, I was one year into my sobriety and still trying to find out who I am without drinking. I decided to start exploring the things I used to enjoy as a child, which led me towards drawing. I was really out of practice at that point and struggled with a debilitating amount of perfectionism, so a daily drawing project seemed like just the thing I’d need to get going again.

Picking one subject to focus on removed the resistance of thinking about, ‘what will I draw today?’, and making it public via social media created a sense of accountability. I prefer working with a marker on paper because that way you just have to work with the possible mistakes and learn to embrace them.

As I carried on drawing the same thing every day, I started to use more words and naturally gravitated towards expressing difficult emotions, and sharing mental health insights as I started to heal. To my surprise, the Instagram account got a lot of attention as people related to what the silly cartoon raccoon had to say and found comfort in its daily presence on their feeds.

The raccoons have brought joy and acted as a form of mutual support for people from all walks of life, especially younger people struggling with their mental health. This is something I am most proud of, because I used to feel so alone and isolated with these things throughout my youth, and it warms my heart to have had a positive impact on someone else’s journey by sharing pieces of mine.