New year, new outlook. Seems easy enough, right? But while ambitious resolution lists and radical life and health readjustments sound like good moves when the calendar flips, for most of us wholesale change is a lot to get your arms around.
Author, artist, yoga instructor and licensed clinical social worker Susan Schrott has a better idea: Wrap those arms around yourself instead and take it day by day.
It’s the notion that fueled the writing and artwork in her illustrated book “Rise with Radiance: Drawings and Inspirational Words to Light Your Path Every Day of the Year.”

“This book I intended to really just be about everything I longed for. I was determined to keep it in the affirmative, and to write it as if somebody was sitting with me who needed to hear something — to let them know they were loved, and they are enough, full stop,” says Schrott from her art studio in Shelter Island, a place she spent a lifetime of summers and moved full-time to after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, the book, which Schrott self-published in 2023, is a year of day-by-day mantras accompanied by her paintings done on her own woven textiles, born of a desire to create both art and positivity; a sort of meditative, loving antidote to self-sabotage.
“I can say that I now thank my negative thoughts, because I see them as little blessings and little gifts to remind me of the truth, which is I am abundant, I am loved, I am enough,” she says. “You are enough. We are all good enough,” she says. “I think the negative, whatever that sounds like, I now go, ‘Oh, thank you for reminding me I don’t need to believe you anymore. I don’t fight with it and I think that’s the freedom. I could make room for the love and the book just came through that way. I surrendered to joy.”
Before moving into psychotherapy, Schrott had pursued a career in theater and dance, studying with George Balanchine and Martha Graham, and performing regularly on the stage. It was a world she loved but one that created the foundation for a life’s work in helping others to live their best lives.
“In my mid-twenties, I just wasn’t happy anymore, and I had my own struggles and anxiety being in theater.” Over the years, she grappled with eating disorders and, at 28, it pushed her to transition into going back to college to study the psychology of women and become a practitioner specializing in eating disorders.

Much of the book’s creation coincided with the failing health and subsequent passing of her father, the photographer Victor Friedman. Because she was running back and forth between homes and hospitals, Schrott kept with her at all times a bag full of 5 x 7-inch strips of fabric she’d woven herself, along with some colored pencils. To handle the emotional strain, she would take time every day to practice yoga or some kind of movement and, following that, snap a selfie and write down words that were meaningful in the moment. She vowed to herself to do this daily for a year.
As the daily words were compiled — phrases like, “If you have spoken unkindly to yourself, offer these words: I am sorry. I love you,” and “To ease your broken heart, embrace and cherish those you love today, near, far, and beyond” — Schrott took the corresponding selfies and used them as templates to create drawings on the handmade pieces of cloth.
The project was incredibly personal, but as it grew it drew the attention of family, friends and even others outside her circle, weaving a local network of readers who needed Schrott’s daily lessons and messages as much as she did. You might say it became the sleeper hit of the East End, with copies sold on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and also on hand at local businesses like Shelter Island’s Pure Soul as well as Finley’s Fiction, and on the North Fork in Clarke’s Garden & Home and in Greenport Pilates & Yoga.

Currently, Schrott is working on the creation of an art installation that will encompass four 5’x7′ panels using the original textile artwork she created for the book.
“The real goal is to pause and breathe, exhale, and ask yourself: What am I feeling? What do I need?” says Schrott. “Each of us has the capacity not only to heal our own wounds, but in helping other people. In doing that we manifest more joy, more creativity, more hope. And certainly more faith and courage. Every day, I choose love over everything else. That’s what I do.”