This illustration project responds to Katy Waldman's New Yorker essay on the "fawn response"; the psychological pattern of excessive people-pleasing, self-erasure, and pre-emptive appeasement that has become a widely discussed lens for understanding trauma-driven behaviour in relationships, workplaces, and online life. Drawing on Waldman's critical examination of two recent books on the subject, the essay traces fawning from its clinical origins as a trauma response, alongside fight, flight, and freeze, through its current life as a viral, Instagram-friendly diagnosis, questioning along the way whether the drive toward "unfawning" and radical self-prioritisation risks isolating people as much as it claims to liberate them.

Translating this dense, argument-driven piece of cultural criticism into illustrative form presented a distinct challenge: rather than depicting a single scene or narrative moment, the work needed to visualise an abstract emotional and psychological state, the anxious, self-erasing posture of the "fawner", while capturing the essay's wry, critical tone. The resulting imagery uses the visual metaphor of the superhero under pressure to give visual form to concepts like hypervigilance, self-doubt, and the blurred line between empathy and self-abandonment, without flattening the essay's ambivalence into a single easy image.
The project reflects a broader interest in editorial illustration as a form of visual argument; one that doesn't simply decorate a text, but interprets and extends its ideas for a reader encountering the piece for the first time.