Pain Made Her Draw. Joy Made Her Share. Politics Made Her Publish.
There's a version of this story that's easy to tell. An artist overcomes adversity. Creates something beautiful. Shares it with the world. Inspires others. The end.
That version isn't wrong, exactly. But it leaves out most of what makes Hope Abbigail Nulf's story actually worth telling. So let's try again, from the beginning, with the parts that don't get smoothed over.
Hope is a special education teacher in Las Vegas. She has been drawing a character named Doodle since 1977, a character who reflects, with humor and honesty and an almost startling amount of personality, the inner world of someone who spent most of her early life feeling like her inner world was the one thing she absolutely could not show anyone. She grew up in Battle Creek, Michigan, in an era when being trans was not just socially unacceptable, it was, in the most practical sense, invisible. There was no language for it. No community. No one to look to and say: yes, this is real, you are not alone.
So Hope survived the way people survive when they don't have the resources they need: by finding what was available. Athletics, for one, she earned thirteen varsity letters in high school, because she needed proof that she was good at something, and that was where the proof lived. Drawing, for another. After surviving a beating that left her hospitalized, she picked up a pen and started making sense of her life the only way that felt honest. Doodle was what came out of that.
Pain made her draw. Joy made her share. Politics made her publish. Each stage of Doodle's life has been a response to exactly the moment Hope was living in.
For decades, Doodle lived mostly in sketchbooks. Not entirely, Hope has always been a maker, always been someone whose inner world has to go somewhere, but largely private, largely for herself, a creative language she used to process what daily life didn't give her room to say out loud. And then something changed. She transitioned in 2000, and the slow work of becoming more fully herself, the shifts in family relationships, the finding of true friendship at forty, the discovery that happiness was actually something she was allowed to have changed what Doodle was for. A character born of pain started to emerge from joy. The same pen, a different light.
About four years ago, Hope began sharing Doodle with her LGBTQ+ community. The response was warmer than she'd expected. Because Doodle is not a character who makes things look easier than they are. She's funny, yes. She has personality and insight and the kind of humor that comes from looking at something painful long enough to find what's absurd about it. But she's also honest. And in spaces where people are used to having their experiences either dismissed or dramatized, a character who simply reflects them with care, with clarity, without apology is genuinely rare.
Her debut book, Trans in the Time of Trump, is the first in a series of nine. It is political in a way that doesn't soften or hedge because the moment we're in is political in a way that doesn't soften or hedge, and Hope has been paying attention. But it is also personal, rooted, specific. It is the natural next chapter of a story that started in a hospital room with a pen and a character who had nowhere else to go.
What Hope is building with the Doodle series is something that takes time to see clearly: a record of a life-transforming experience, and the argument that transformation makes available to everyone who witnesses it. That is when someone survives something, creates something, and then shares it. When they let the private survival become a public gift, it changes what other people believe is possible for themselves. Not because they are told to believe it. But because they see it. Because proof beats persuasion every time.