But mostly, I’ve been thinking about how carefully Dolly built Dolly. She may be one of the greatest acts of self-invention in American culture. She constructed a woman so specific she became universal. Southern, but never confined by the South. Christian, without requiring you to believe what she believes. Sexual, but never reduced to sex. Rich beyond imagination, but forever tethered to a one-room cabin in Tennessee. She was almost cartoonishly feminine, yet somehow the exaggeration made her power impossible to miss.

Somehow, Dolly crossed the lines that usually separate us:
Class. Politics. Religion. Geography. Gender. Generational.
Everybody gets a little bit of Dolly and that didn’t happen by accident.

Dolly radicalized me. There’s something about a woman becoming increasingly successful and powerful and deciding that the appropriate response is not to make herself more serious-looking but to add another rhinestone.

Dolly has never pretended to be natural.

The hairstyles are wigs. The nails are outrageous. The clothes sparkle from several counties away. Even the original blueprint was artificial. As a child, Dolly became fascinated by a woman in town everyone else called “trash”—bleached hair, red lips, high heels, tight clothes. Where the town folk saw vulgarity, little Dolly saw glamour. I love that. So she built herself accordingly. And then she never stopped building.

A woman becoming increasingly successful and powerful and deciding the appropriate response isn’t to make herself look more serious but to add another rhinestone? From a marketing perspective, this is genius.

You could draw Dolly’s silhouette in five lines and we’d know exactly who it was.
The woman everyone is looking at designed exactly what we would see.

She understood something about femininity that I think we’re still trying to understand now:
Being looked at doesn’t necessarily mean being powerless.
That the woman being looked at is the person controlling the entire room.

Hot girl feminism
I don’t know if Dolly would appreciate me calling her a pioneer of hot girl feminism. Actually, I think she’d laugh. She has famously resisted the feminist label, despite building a life that looks suspiciously like a feminist manifesto.

She wrote about sexual double standards.
She wrote 9 to 5.
She left Porter Wagoner’s television show when she wanted greater independence.
She protected ownership of her songwriting.

When Elvis Presley wanted to record I Will Always Love You, his manager wanted half of her publishing rights. Through tears, Dolly said no. And thank God she kept the rights. But what fascinates me most is that Dolly never seemed interested in becoming less feminine in order to prove she was powerful. She did something much more interesting. She exaggerated it.
She became more Dolly.
More blonde.
More breasts.
More nails.
More sparkle.

She knew exactly what people assumed about women who looked like her. And there is power in letting someone underestimate you. You get to watch them discover their mistake. To me, that’s hot girl feminism. Not the idea that beauty itself is liberation. Beauty can become another cage. It’s the refusal to bargain that a woman must choose.

Beautiful or intelligent.
Sexual or respectable.
Soft or ambitious.
Feminine or powerful.
Dolly seemed to ask:
Why would I choose?
I’ll take the tits and the publishing rights.

While her appearance was artificial, obviously and joyfully artificial, it somehow made her feel more authentic. Maybe because authenticity isn’t actually about presenting ourselves without construction.

We all construct ourselves. Clothes are construction. Makeup is construction. Photography is construction. Writing is construction. A personal brand is construction. Even the stories we tell about ourselves eventually become architecture.
Dolly constructed a woman so specific that she somehow became universal.

And yet, we barely knew her.

Beauty might make Dolly recognizable. It doesn’t explain why we love her.
For that, you need the stories.
The coat her mother stitched from scraps.
The one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains.
Jolene and her flaming locks of auburn hair.
A working woman pouring herself a cup of ambition.
Dolly gives us details. And details are what make mythology feel human.

She doesn’t simply tell us, I came from poverty. She gives us a coat.
She doesn’t tell us, I’ve experienced jealousy. She gives us Jolene.
She doesn’t tell us, I understand working women. She gives us 9 to 5.

Maybe that’s another thing Dolly understood about marketing long before we started calling it storytelling: People rarely remember your message.
They remember the image that carried it.

But my favorite trick from Dolly might be not knowing her at all.

For a woman who seems to have told us everything, we actually know remarkably little about her. She was married to Carl Dean for nearly sixty years. And we barely saw him.

There were so few photographs that people joked he didn’t exist.

Dolly didn’t turn her marriage into content. She didn’t need to show us breakfast or arguments or every room in her house to convince us she was authentic. She didn’t need her private life to become another extension of the Dolly Parton brand. She kept that for herself.

Dolly mastered something that the age of social media and personal branding seems to have forgotten: Intimacy is not the same thing as access.

And somehow, that never made us feel distant from her.

It made us feel like we knew her. I think about this nonstop since we’re living in an era that tells us visibility requires disclosure. As someone who makes things and puts pieces of herself on the internet, I’m still taking notes from her. I don’t have to share everything if I don’t want to.

If Dolly were starting her career today, some marketing consultant would probably tell her she needed content pillars.

Beauty.
Business advice.
GRWM before the Grand Ole Opry.

Tell your story. Show your face. Share your process. Show your home. Tell us what happened. Tell us who hurt you. Tell us who you’re sleeping beside. Turn the camera around. Closer. Closer. Closer.

Until eventually there is almost no distance between the person and the audience.

And then we wonder why being perceived becomes exhausting.

This is where Dolly offers another possibility.

She offers mythology. And mythology requires negative space.

The blonde wig wasn’t just hair. It was iconography.
The rhinestones weren’t just clothes. They were visual language.
The Tennessee stories weren’t random anecdotes. They established place.
The jokes established voice.
The songs established emotional intimacy.
Dollywood turned the mythology into an actual physical location you could enter.

Everything pointed back toward the same woman: Dolly. Dolly. Dolly.
Except the private parts. Those belonged to her.
That’s why the brand never swallowed the person.
There was always somewhere Dolly could go that we couldn’t follow.
After all, even in death, Dolly kept something for herself. Her funeral was private, attended only by immediate family.

That’s a lesson in personal branding I wish we talked about more. You don’t have to turn your entire life into content to build a recognizable brand.
In fact, perhaps you shouldn’t.

The architecture of Dolly

But recognizable branding alone doesn’t explain why Dolly Parton is so universally loved. Plenty of celebrities have recognizable brands. Dolly built something bigger.

She built a place where seemingly contradictory people could meet.
Southern and global.
Religious and secular.
Conservative and progressive.
Grandmothers and drag queens.
People who came for country music and people who came for camp.
She crossed lines that increasingly seem impossible to cross.
And she did it without compromising herself down into neutrality.
That’s the remarkable part.

Dolly didn’t become universal by becoming less specific.
She became more specific. More Tennessee. More blonde. More feminine. More Dolly.

Perhaps people can feel when specificity comes from conviction rather than performance.

She wasn’t asking everyone to agree with her.
She wasn’t even asking everyone to understand her.
She simply kept opening the door.
And underneath all that spectacle was generosity.

Dollywood brought jobs and tourism to the place she came from.
Her Imagination Library put books into the hands of children.
Again and again, she turned the enormous attention attached to her name outward.

That’s the difference between visibility and cultural power.
Attention asks:
How do I get people to look at me?

Legacy asks:
Now that they’re looking, what can I build?

You can build a powerful personal brand without making your entire self public. You can be generous without being exposed. You can tell the truth without telling everything. You can create intimacy without handing strangers the keys to every room in your house.
Mystery isn’t the opposite of authenticity. Maybe mystery is a boundary around it.

There is something very feminine to me about that.

Not hiding. Not disappearing. Not making yourself smaller.
Quite the opposite.
Put on the wig. Paint your mouth red. Write the song. Build the business. Walk directly into the spotlight. Let them feel like they’ve known you forever. Give them a door through which they can recognize themselves in you. But don’t confuse being visible with being completely available. Dolly never did.

I’m telling you, everything I know about marketing I really did learn from Dolly Parton: Be unmistakable. Tell a good story. Make people feel welcome. And keep something beautiful for yourself.

I healed that ankle in about a day after journaling about it.
I found my cat after talking to a tree.
Yes, I really did these things.
And yes, I know how all of this sounds.

But lately I have become increasingly convinced that everything is deeply connected.

This is something I’ve been thinking about as I continue learning about Traditional Chinese Medicine—the idea that the body is not a collection of separate parts, but a landscape. Mountains, rivers, valleys, seasons. One thing flowing into another. The internal world responding to the external one.

I am still learning. I don’t pretend to understand all of it.
But I’ve been paying attention.
And some very strange things have happened.

First, I lost my cat.

For 48 hours.

If you’ve been here for any length of time, you probably know her. She is, unofficially but very seriously, the mascot of this Substack.

She appears in my photographs, wanders through the background of my life, sleeps on top of me while I write.

And then she was just—gone.

There is a particular kind of panic that comes from losing an animal.
They cannot call you.
They cannot tell you where they are. (Did I mention my cat is blind?)
You cannot explain to them that you are looking for them.
So you walk around calling their name into the void, into spaces that cannot answer.

I searched everywhere. I called for her. I listened for the smallest sound. I imagined every terrible possibility. I left a shirt of mine and a litter box outside to help her find her way back. After all, she’s looking for me too, right? Right!?

And sometime during those 48 hours, after exhausting everything I knew how to do and posting on various Facebook groups, I went outside and talked to a tree.

I know. It wasn’t random.

The Taínos talked to trees. They understood something I think many of us have forgotten: that the natural world is not simply the backdrop against which human life happens. We are all participating in it.

These are my ancestors.

So I went outside and talked to the tree.
I told it my cat was missing and that I needed help. If she had escaped, surely it had felt her steps somewhere along the way. Trees are connected beneath the dirt. Their roots touch the same earth, communicate, exchange information.

I knew it could help me.
So I put my hand against its bark and asked.
Please bring back what is lost. She is precious to me.

And I don’t mean that metaphorically.
I wasn’t pretending. I wasn’t performing some little ritual because I thought it might make me feel better. I believed the tree could hear me.

Maybe that sounds strange to you. But in the moment, it was the most natural thing for me to do.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been circling lately in my reading about Traditional Chinese Medicine, too. Not that Taíno spirituality and Chinese medicine are the same—they aren’t—but that both have made me question this very Western habit of separating everything.

Body from mind.
Human from nature.
Emotion from illness.
The visible from the invisible.

We inherit this idea that a tree is over there and I am over here.
But what if relationship is happening anyway?
What if the world is much more porous than we’ve been taught to believe?
That we are more porous.

Within 30 mins of me talking to the tree, my cat was back in my arms.
Could it have been coincidence?
Sure. The rational explanation is always assaulting me.
And then, a few days later, I twisted my ankle.

The ankle.

It hurt badly enough that walking was difficult. It swelled. I limped.
My body was telling me to pause, which was inconvenient because I am not particularly good at stopping. My instinct was to keep going, and I did.

But the experience with my cat was still somewhere in my mind.
The tree.
The asking.
The strange feeling of acknowledging that perhaps there were relationships happening around me that I couldn’t completely understand. And I thought about what I had been learning through Traditional Chinese Medicine.

What if the ankle wasn’t only an ankle?
What if, instead of immediately asking how to fix my body, I asked what my body was saying?

So I opened my journal.
What is my body trying to tell me?
And almost immediately, I started writing about stability.
About where I felt supported.
Where I didn’t.
Where I had been moving forward even though some part of me didn’t feel steady.
Where I had been trying to maintain balance in situations that were already asking too much of me.

An ankle is such an ordinary little hinge until it hurts. Then suddenly you understand how much of your life depends on your ability to trust the ground beneath you.

I wrote until I felt like I had reached whatever was underneath it.
And the next day, my ankle was dramatically better.
Not slightly. Not maybe I’m imagining this better.
I could walk normally again. The pain had disappeared, swelling gone!

Was it the rest? Maybe.
Was it my body doing what bodies are designed to do? Of course.
Do I think journaling magically repaired my ankle overnight?
I don’t know.

Everything is talking to everything.

I keep thinking about these two experiences together.
A cat.
A tree.
An ankle.
A journal.

Things that appear to have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
And yet, somehow, they have become part of the same lesson for me.

Traditional Chinese Medicine has been rearranging the way I think about the body because it asks me to consider relationship.
The body in relationship with emotion.
Emotion in relationship with environment.
One part affecting another. Nothing entirely isolated.
Nothing existing only unto itself.

And the more I think this way, the more difficult it becomes to draw a hard line around where I end.

When my cat disappeared, I asked the landscape for help.
When my ankle hurt, I asked my body what it needed to say.
Both times, I listened. And both times, something shifted.
I asked the tree → something returned.
I asked my body → something released.

Maybe that is what I am learning about healing. That it isn’t always an act of fixing. Sometimes it is an act of relationship. Of asking. Of listening. Of allowing something to move through us instead of immediately trying to make it disappear.

I think modern life teaches us to see ourselves as very separate.
My body. My problem. My pain. My cat. My grief. My healing.

But I am beginning to wonder if life is really a circle rather than imagined boundary lines. Whether sometimes, instead of asking,

How do I make this go away?

we might ask,

What is this connected to?

I don’t have a neat explanation for what happened.
I don’t really want one.
My cat came home. My ankle healed.

And somewhere between the tree and the journal, I remembered that there are ways of knowing the world that are ancient. Sometimes you can simply participate in it!

Put your hand against the bark.
Listen to your body.
Ask the ridiculous question.
Follow the strange little thread connecting one living thing to another.
Maybe nothing answers.

Or maybe the tree, the body, the animal, the earth beneath your feet have been speaking all along. And we are simply remembering that we belong to each other.

Rinko Kawauchi found me at the Aperture booth in Miami during Art Basel. Her book, Illuminance, sat there with its deep indigo cover, a single drop of water resting perfectly at the center of a leaf. It called to me.

The way the pages folded into themselves: the square images, made through the quiet gaze of a twin-lens reflex camera. The essays tucked away at the end of the book rather than giving an introduction, it makes you experience her work deeply. Everything about it held me in a trance.

If you didn’t know this about me, you will now: books have a way of finding me. They become prophetic timestamps of my artistic becoming—markers of who I was, what I was searching for, and where I was headed next.

For the last four years, I have been studying Japanese photographers. One artist led me to another, and slowly I became submerged in their philosophies, their ways of seeing, their reverence for the ordinary and the fleeting.

What I didn’t realize was that I had already encountered Kawauchi before. Her image graces the cover of I’m So Happy You’re Here. Once again, I found myself following an invisible thread—one that keeps pulling me deeper into the work.

And, as always, I’m bringing you along for the ride.

What strikes me most about Kawauchi’s photographs is how little they demand from their subjects. She doesn’t seem to ask the world to perform for her.

A hand. A bird. A half-eaten meal. A flower beginning to wilt. Light catching water. The strange, beautiful evidence that something was alive here for a moment.

Her photographs make the ordinary feel sacred without turning it into spectacle.

I think this is partly why her work feels so familiar to me. For years, I believed photography was about knowing when something was worth photographing. Kawauchi makes me wonder if the real practice is learning to believe that everything might be.

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”People often say that I have a child's eye. For example, I stare at ants gathering around sugar, or when I seek shelter from the rain, I gaze upon snails. These are things which you often do when you are a child aren't they? I have a very similar sensibility to that.”

The longer I study photographers, the less interested I become in learning how to photograph like them. I want to know what they can teach me about seeing.

Kawauchi makes me want to become quieter behind the camera.
To stop hunting for photographs.
To trust the seemingly insignificant.
To notice what disappears while I’m busy waiting for something more important to happen. And perhaps most of all, to photograph without needing to know why something matters yet. The meaning will arrive later.

Your Turn | Prompt

For this challenge, I’m reaching for my Holga.

Kawauchi often works within the square frame, and I want to see what happens when I borrow that boundary for a little while. The Holga feels especially fitting: imperfect, unpredictable, and incapable of giving me complete control.

Look for the things you normally pass without noticing—the light falling across your breakfast, water left in the sink, an insect on the pavement, an unmade bed, fruit beginning to soften, a hand resting on a table.

The challenge isn’t to make the ordinary beautiful. It’s to notice the beauty that was already there.

Take one photograph each day.

At the end of the week, lay the seven images beside one another. Don’t only ask which photograph is your favorite. Look for the invisible threads between them.

What did you keep noticing?

We are surrounded by bodies. We have unprecedented access to desire—or at least its performance. Sex is marketed to us through perfume ads, music videos, dating apps, gym culture, even productivity culture (“be more attractive,” “be more confident,” “optimize yourself,” “Looksmaxing”). And yet, the most hypersexualized societies are not necessarily the most erotic. That sentence has been following me around for weeks. I figured it was time to find out what it was trying to tell me.

Read more

It has been raining since Thursday.
Not dramatically.
Not the kind of storm that makes the news.
Just steady enough to change the atmosphere of everything.

The kind of rain that settles into your body.
The kind that makes you forget what warmth on your skin feels like.

I have been thinking lately about emotional weather.
How some people carry entire climates inside them.
How a mood can enter a room before a word is ever spoken.

A door closes slightly too hard.
A sigh stretches across the kitchen.
Silence gathers weight.

And suddenly everyone else in the house begins adjusting themselves around it.

I think there are people who experience emotion privately,
and people whose emotions become environmental.
You can feel them the way you feel humidity.

They aren’t cruel, they don’t even intend harm.
Their nervous systems spill outward while others quietly absorb.

I look back and realize I have spent years absorbing.

Monitoring tone.
Listening to footsteps.
Trying to determine whether the evening will feel warm or heavy.
Learning how to make myself smaller in the presence of someone else’s storm.

This is the strange thing about living beside emotional loudness:
eventually you stop noticing how much space it takes up because adapting becomes instinct.

You learn to keep conversations light.
To postpone your own needs.
To wait until the weather passes before bringing yourself fully into the room.

And after enough time, you realize you have built an entire personality around preserving peace.

I used to think loneliness was physical distance.
Now I think it may be the experience of constantly reaching toward someone who has disappeared into their own internal climate.

There is a particular grief in missing someone who is standing right beside you.
Especially when you know they are suffering too.

That is what makes emotional weather so difficult to write about.
Rain is not evil.
Rain is natural.
Necessary, even.
But endless rain changes a person.
Plants begin bending toward any available light.
Bodies ache from the absence of warmth.
The whole world starts feeling damp, eroding.

And eventually you stop asking whether tomorrow will be sunny.
You just learn to live wet.

I think that is the part no one talks about enough:
how exhausting it is to build a life inside unpredictability.
How tiring it becomes to emotionally brace before someone has even spoken.

Some people darken a room without dimming a single light.

Lately, I have been wondering what it would feel like to live somewhere emotionally temperate. Somewhere soft.
Somewhere calm enough for the nervous system to unclench.
Somewhere I do not have to earn warmth by surviving the hurricane first.

Still, even after long grey skies, the body remembers sunlight.

Maybe that is why some part of me continues turning instinctively toward warmth whenever it appears.

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Artists have a way of giving form to what we cannot name.
Of creating a visual language for something we are living through
but do not yet have words for.

Sometimes you recognize yourself inside a work
before you understand why.
Sometimes the work understands before you do.

Buy Me a Roll of Film

That’s why I feel indebted to the women whose work helped me grieve
after my grandma passed.

I think of them now as my grief doulas—
not because they guided me out,
but because they showed me how to stay in it.
And, when the time was right,
how to create from it.

With Lim Sang-choon and When Life Gives You Tangerines,
grief is folded into the everyday—
into meals, into seasons, into the quiet endurance of living.
It does not announce itself.
It ripens slowly, alongside everything else.
She reminds me that grief can be gentle,
even as it persists.

With Silvana Estrada and Vendrán Suaves Lluvias,
grief continues.
The world does not stop, and neither does the song.
There is no resistance in it—only presence.

In Un Rayo de Luz, there is a line that breaks me each time:
“Como será de hermosa la muerte que nadie ha vuelto de allá.”
How beautiful death must be, that no one chooses to come back.

She wrote this album after her best friend and collaborator was kidnapped and murdered in Mexico.
In that same song, she pleads to the wind—
“Devuélvanme a mis amigos.”
Bring back my friends.

It is an album that has held my hand,
and given me space to cry and plead as well.

With Rosalía’s Lux, grief becomes luminous.
It refracts instead of resolves.
Mourning is offered up—like confession, like prayer.
Pain is not erased,
but transformed into something melodic,
something that reaches toward hope.

With Han Kang—in The White Book and Human Acts—
grief expands beyond the individual.
It moves through bodies, histories, entire nations.
It belongs to more than one person at a time.
Collective grief touches all of us, for generations to come.

With Hamnet, directed by Chloe Zhao, grief moves like air through a house.
It lingers in corners, in gestures, in what is not said.
It cannot always be spoken—
so it finds its way through image, through atmosphere,
through something we experience together.

And with Flor Garduño,
especially her portrait of Juan O’Gorman,
grief exists inside the image before death arrives.

A photograph that feels like memory arriving early.
Like something already aware of its own absence.

There is a kind of comfort in recognizing
that what feels singular
has already been felt,
already been shaped,
already been seen through someone else’s hands.

Lo que no se nombra, igual se siente.

I don’t think any of them were trying to explain grief.
They were making something from it—
and in doing so,
they made space for the rest of us.

To speak it.
To become fluent in it.

I am still learning the language of it.
And I find hope in knowing
I am not the only one who speaks it.

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There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with making things now. To turn a thought into a caption, a process into a tutorial, a moment into something shareable before it has even settled into your body. You begin to feel like you are living alongside an invisible editor—always asking, is this usable? is this interesting? should this be posted?

Buy Me a Film Roll

And over time, the line between making and sharing starts to collapse.

I first noticed this on Tumblr and Blogger. I grew up on the internet and expanded with it. I’ve always had a blog, back when blogs were a hodgepodge of cut-out articles, movie screenshots, and experimental photos—everything layered together without needing to make sense. But when my audience grew on Tumblr, I deactivated the page. I couldn’t compete with the invisible editor once the demand outgrew my whimsy. I didn’t want to. I wanted to try things, not meet expectations.

The internet rewards clarity, immediacy, and performance. It asks you to present, not to process.

By contrast, a studio is a place where things are allowed to be unfinished. Where ideas can exist without explanation. Where you can make something without immediately considering how it will be received. It’s a space for uncertainty, for mistakes, for work that doesn’t yet know what it is.

There is tension in the desire to live an offline life, one that feels slow and attentive and rooted in actual experience, while also wanting to build a body of work that attracts the right kind of attention. Opportunities don’t appear in isolation. People need to encounter your work, to understand something about what you do, to feel drawn into your world.

So the instinct is to show more. To share more. To stay visible.
I think about how Camille Mendoza describes it: “Creating online in what feels like an anti-human, post-creativity era asks something similar of us. As a one-person operator, you’re expected to be all three at once: Visionary, Manager, and Technician.”
But visibility, when it’s nonstop, can start to interfere with the work itself.

Discovery is the point

Not everything is meant to be shared at the same stage of its life. Some ideas need privacy in order to become fully formed. Some work needs to exist without an audience in the room, without the immediate feedback loop of reaction and approval. Because the moment you begin creating with that audience in mind—even subtly—you begin to anticipate instead of discover. You shape the ending before you’ve allowed yourself to experience the middle.

And discovery is the point.

This is something film photography has taught me in a way nothing else has. You take the photograph and then you wait. There is no immediate confirmation, no instant adjustment. You don’t know exactly what you have. You have to trust that what you saw, what you felt, was enough. There is a built-in distance between making and seeing, and that distance protects the integrity of the work.

It allows the image to exist before it is judged.

We don’t have many of those distances left. Everything is immediate, editable, optimized. You can refine something endlessly before it ever meets the world. And yet, the work that stays with us rarely feels optimized. It feels lived in. It carries time. It carries attention. It feels like it wasn’t made for an audience, even though it somehow reaches one.

So the question becomes less about whether to share and more about when.

The Shift

Protecting your creativity isn’t about disappearing. It’s about refusing to let every stage of your process be consumed. It’s about understanding that your studio—whether it’s a literal room, a walk, a conversation, or a quiet moment with your thoughts—cannot exist in a space that is constantly asking you to perform.

I spent most of 2025 preparing to leave social media. But when the new year arrived, I wasn’t so sure that disappearing was the answer. I began to understand that the internet could be something else—not just a distraction from the work.

The internet can be a gallery.
It can be a bridge.
It can be a place where your work is encountered.

But it is not where the work should be made.

There is a difference between work that is created for visibility and work that becomes visible because it is strong enough to stand on its own. One is shaped by expectation. The other is shaped by attention.

And attention—real attention—requires a kind of privacy.

I’m learning to protect that more intentionally. To let ideas remain unspoken until they are clear. To resist the urge to document everything as it’s happening. To allow my work to belong to me before it belongs to anyone else.

Because not everything needs to be turned into something right away.
Some things need time to become real.

And if I’m not careful, the internet will take that time from me—
and call it visibility.

This is my analog year—
where things are allowed to exist before they’re explained,
where the work is held a little longer in my hands
before I offer it to the world.

In the summer of 1915, Claude Monet was painting water. Not the war. Not the mud or the wire or the faces of his countrymen dissolving into the landscape they had been sent to defend. He was painting his pond at Giverny: its light, its lilies, the trembling of the sky in it. That would consume the last decade of his life.

The Western Front was less than a hundred miles away.
The guns were sometimes audible from the garden.

Buy Me a Film Roll

I keep thinking about this lately. I am an artist, alive in my own difficult moment, and the question it raises won’t leave me alone. What do we owe the world when the world is burning? Do we turn toward the wound, or do we tend the garden? And is that even the right question to ask? What’s our role, if any, in times of war?

The One Who Stays

When war was declared in August 1914, Monet was seventy-three, his sight already failing from cataracts. His son Michel was called up to serve the war. His stepson too. His closest friend, Auguste Rodin, left for England. Monet? He stayed, and he painted.

There’s something quietly defiant in that. Giverny was not untouched—the trains carrying the wounded still moved through the valley, a steady reminder that the world was unraveling nearby. His letters from that time carry a kind of shame. He wrote to a friend that it felt wrong to be thinking about painting while so many were suffering.

“I am ashamed to be thinking about little technical experiments while so many people suffer.” —Claude Monet, in correspondence, c. 1915

And still, he kept returning to the work.
If anything, with more urgency.

The canvases expanded, overtaking the room, becoming something you didn’t just look at but stepped into. His world narrowed to the surface of water—and somehow, through that narrowing, it opened.

The Water Lilies, installed at the Orangerie in 1927, were offered to France not as a victory, but as a kind of refuge. Later, they would be called some of the first immersive environments in Western art.

But I don’t think he was trying to invent anything.
I think he was trying to give something.
A place to rest the eyes.

Was it escapism? I don’t think so.
Escapism looks away. Monet didn’t. His guilt makes that clear. He knew what was happening. He carried it with him. And still, he chose the pond.
Not as avoidance—
but as a kind of wager.
That tending to beauty, even then, might still mean something.

The One Who Looks

Käthe Kollwitz made a different wager, and paid a different price.

Her son Peter was killed in Flanders in October 1914. Eighteen, a volunteer. Dead within weeks of the war’s beginning. She did not turn away from that fact. She moved toward it—and, in many ways, remained there for the rest of her life.

The work that followed is difficult to sit with for long. Mothers gripping their children. Bodies bent under the weight of grief. Hands reaching, and meeting nothing. Where Monet’s lilies allow the eye to soften, Kollwitz’s figures do the opposite. They hold you in place. They refuse distance. What John Berger once called an art of solidarity—work that does not let you look away.

Pietà (Mother with dead Son), 1937-1939

It’s tempting to compare them. To say Kollwitz was braver, more honest.
That to witness suffering directly is the more serious act.
And there is truth in that. It takes a certain kind of courage to render the wound without softening it. But I’m not sure it’s that simple.

Kollwitz was not sentimental. Her work is as exacting as it is devastating. Every line is deliberate, held with care. She understood that grief, to endure, had to be given form. That it needed to be shaped, not just felt.

She wanted her sorrow to last. And that, too, is an aesthetic decision.

The beauty is not in what she shows—
but in how closely she is willing to look.

The One Who Shouts

And then there is Picasso.

Guernica, completed in 1937 after the Nazi bombing of a Basque town, feels like something else entirely.

Not refuge.
Not witness—at least not in the way Monet or Kollwitz hold those positions.

It comes at you.
The distortions don’t just describe violence—they carry it. The fractured bodies, the broken geometry, the way the image refuses to settle… it’s not something you simply look at. It disrupts you. Looking becomes part of the impact.

What Pablo Picasso understood—and what keeps the work alive—is that form doesn’t have to soften to be powerful. It can sharpen. It can cut.

This isn’t documentation.
It isn’t journalism.
It’s a work of precise, devastating intelligence turned toward atrocity.

Something like beauty—though not quite beauty as we usually mean it—becomes protest. Becomes evidence. Becomes a record that doesn’t fade with the news cycle.

Three gestures, then.

A garden.
A mother in grief.
A scream rendered in black and white.

They don’t cancel each other out. They sit beside each other, each holding a different edge of the same question:
What does it mean to make something—
when you are living inside history, and cannot step outside of it?

I’ve been sitting with this long enough to suspect the question itself might be wrong.

Witness or beauty. Urgency or contemplation. As if they live on opposite sides.
I don’t think they do.

Monet’s late paintings—those softened edges, those surfaces that almost dissolve—don’t feel like comfort to me. They feel like a world seen through failing eyes. A world loosening at its seams. There is grief there, even if it never names itself.

And Kollwitz—so direct, so unflinching—her figures carry a kind of beauty too. Not because suffering is beautiful, but because her attention is. It’s exact. It’s human. It refuses to look away.

In both, the beauty lives in the seriousness of the looking.

So maybe what the artist owes isn’t a mode.
Not witness over refuge. Not protest over stillness.
Maybe what’s owed is attention. Presence.
A refusal to be careless.
A refusal to be shallow.
Some recognition—inside the work, or inside the life that makes it—that something is breaking, and that to make anything in the middle of that is not neutral.

The world doesn’t need more spectators.
It needs people willing to stay with the work.
To create from that place:
The pond.
The body bent in grief.
The fractured image.

To keep making—especially when it feels small against what’s happening.
Because the failure isn’t in choosing beauty. The failure is in choosing beauty and pretending you don’t know why it’s needed.

As peace talks approached in 1918, Monet wrote to Clemenceau to offer the Water Lilies. He called it a bouquet. A bouquet—something gathered from a garden, something you can hold in your hands. But a bouquet is not nothing. It’s what you bring when you cannot repair what’s been broken. To the sick or grieving. When the scale of the wound exceeds you. When all you can do is make something small, and carry it forward. It acknowledges the limit. And still, it offers.

I hold Monet’s garden, Kollwitz’s grief & Picasso’s screams together in my own bouquet of thoughts, and they don’t cancel each other out.

They answer the same impossible question:
how to remain human,
how to make something that lasts,
when everything around you insists on disappearing.

I don’t know that I’ll ever stop asking what my work owes to the time I’m living in.
But I’m beginning to believe that the asking—
done seriously, without turning away—
isn’t separate from the work.

It might be where it begins.

Käthe Kollwitz's memorial sculpture The Grieving Parents stands in a military cemetery in Vladslo, Belgium, near the grave of her son Peter. Monet's Water Lilies panels are housed in the Orangerie, Paris, in two oval rooms that many visitors describe as among the most quietly devastating spaces in any museum. Both are worth the journey.

No matter how powerful my brain is, I still forget things.

Lately I’ve been wondering how much of that forgetting belongs to me, and how much belongs to the way we live now. Social media has changed the way I perceive and store information. Everything arrives quickly and disappears just as fast.

I worry sometimes about what that does to the mind.

And yet something strange has been happening.

In the last year, memories have begun surfacing again—quietly, almost stubbornly. A piece of light. A delicate fragrance. A moment from childhood. Whole places I thought I had lost.

And with them, the poems.

I have written more poetry since last spring than at any other time in my life.

The poet José Manuel Caballero Bonald wrote:
In the end,
poetry is what I find beneath my feet
when I was sure that this time
I was going to fall.

I thought about it last night, how lately it feels like that, while watching Secret Agent. Like remembering itself has become a small act of resistance.
Against the scroll.
Against the forgetting.

Poetry is an unexpected floor beneath my feet—salvation, balance, revelation in moments of fragility.

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The camera stayed where I left it.
Strap coiled.
Lens capped.
Patient.

The light arrived anyway.

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I remember the first time someone asked me where I was from.
“Nashville,” I said, because by then I had learned that answers can be strategic.

“No, but where are you really from?”

The word really hangs in the air like an accusation. It implies a truer origin, one that doesn’t match what I’ve offered. It asks for proof of difference.

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Puerto Rico, I say.

“Oh wow. So… when did you come to the States?”

I never know how to answer that one without feeling like I’m correcting a teacher.
I don’t say this is the States. I don’t say I was born a citizen. I don’t say the island is not foreign soil. I just smile, and somewhere inside, something folds.

It is not anger.
It is not even offense.
It is a small, private dislocation.

There is a particular loneliness in being technically included.
I am American.
And yet.

The cadence of my childhood does not live here. The Spanish that once moved freely through my days now arrives carefully measured, reserved for phone calls home or whispered to my daughters so they don’t forget the shape of it. I translate myself more often than I realize. I soften certain pronunciations. I round the edges of my vowels.

Code-switching is a muscle you don’t know you’re flexing until you’re tired.

When hurricanes approach the island, I watch from a distance that feels like betrayal. I check on my loved ones through a screen. I send prayers and Venmo transfers and voice notes heavy with worry. The wind howls there; the sky is clear here. I go to work. I post content. I make dinner. My body is in Tennessee. My nervous system is somewhere over the Atlantic.

This is not immigration in the legal sense.
But it is a kind of emotional migration.

I think the more honest word is diaspora, a scattering.

Not forced by paperwork but by economics, by dreams, by love, by ambition.
A leaving that does not require permission but still rearranges you.

To belong to a diaspora is to live with a subtle double vision. You are always slightly aware of elsewhere. You carry it in your gestures, in your food, in the way you respond to certain music like a door has opened inside your chest. I can be fully present in my life here and still feel the tide pulling toward where I began. That tension is always humming beneath the surface.

In Tennessee, I am Latina.
In Puerto Rico, I am just from there.
Here, my heritage becomes an identifier. It precedes me. It is something people are curious about. Complimented. Questioned. Occasionally, dare I say it? exoticized.

There is a strange experience in being seen as other in a country that is legally yours. It makes you aware of how identity is not only a fact but a perception.
Citizenship is a document, belonging is a negotiation.

There are days when I feel entirely integrated. I know the roads. I know the seasons. I have built community. My children were born here. My work is here. My routines are here. I love this life.

And there are days when I miss the smell of the air before rain on the island. The way Spanish floats without translation. The familiarity of faces that look like mine without explanation. The warmth of kisses and hugs that are expected, not asked for.

I did not cross a border.
But I crossed into a different rhythm of being when I moved here.
Perhaps what unsettles me most is the in-between.
Not immigrant. Not foreigner. Not fully perceived as native either.

There is no ceremony for this kind of move. No oath. No new passport. No official language to describe the subtle reshaping of self that happens when you leave an island and settle inland.

You simply adapt.
You answer questions.
You grow roots in new soil.
And sometimes, late at night, you wonder where the original ones are still tangled.

—

I think about my daughters often in this context.

They are Island and mainland braided together in a way that feels seamless to them. They move between identities without the same friction. They do not remember leaving because they did not leave, they don’t have to claim identity elsewhere or feel othered because they look foreign. For them, there is no question of immigrant.

For me, there is only the quiet awareness that something was carried across water. Memory. Accent. History. Grief. Pride.
The invisible luggage.

So am I an immigrant?

No.

And also—
there are moments when I understand the emotional terrain of those who are.

The recalibration. The way you learn to read a room more carefully. The way you measure what to reveal and what to simplify. The way you hold onto where you’re from as both anchor and ache.
I did not need permission to move here.
But I still had to renegotiate who I was once I arrived.

Maybe the word is not the point.
Maybe what matters is acknowledging that movement changes us, even when the law says it doesn’t.
Maybe identity is not a passport stamped once and settled forever.
Maybe it is tidal.
It follows you inland.
It recedes.
It returns.
It reshapes the shoreline quietly over time.

I am a U.S. citizen.
I am Puerto Rican.
I am from here.
I am from there.
I did not cross a border.

But something in me did.
And I am still learning how to carry it gently.

I didn’t watch it on my couch.
Not while folding laundry.
Not with my phone face-up, buzzing beside me like a second heartbeat.

I sat in the dark with strangers, inside a building that still believes attention is sacred.

There’s something grounding about entering a place built for one purpose only—to sit still and receive. The Belcourt, in this case, doesn’t ask you to multitask. It doesn’t reward half-presence. The lights dim, the screen glows, and suddenly your only job is to stay.

No pausing.
No skipping ahead.
No checking what other people are thinking in real time.

Just the slow surrender of two hours.

I felt the initial twitch, of course—the reflex to reach, to check, to fill the quiet. But it passed. What replaced it was something older and steadier: immersion. The kind that doesn’t spike your nervous system but smooths it out. The kind that reminds you the mind can rest inside one thing without fracturing.

Watching a film this way feels increasingly rare. Almost ceremonial. Like stepping into a church where the liturgy is light and sound and silence shared with people you’ll never know.

When the credits rolled, no one clapped. No one rushed. We stood, quietly, as if waking from the same dream.

Outside, the night felt slower. The world hadn’t ended while we were gone. Nothing urgent had been missed.

This is what I mean when I say I’m trying to live more analog—not rejecting technology, but choosing places and experiences that protect my attention for me. Cultural institutions like this matter because they hold the line when we forget how.

They remind us that stillness is not empty.
That presence is not passive.
That giving something your full attention is a form of respect.

I hope places like this never disappear.
I hope we keep showing up.
I hope we keep practicing how to stay

Are you on Letterbxd too?

.

The phone now lives on the kitchen counter.
The light that slips through the seams of the curtains is what wakes me.
I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be fully awake without consuming.
Unfortunately—
it’s a lovely feeling.

Now I reach for a book, or a journal.
Or sometimes the bra I flung to the floor in the middle of the night,
because the cat sleeps on my chest,
warm and insistent,
like an electric blanket.

This is how it starts now—my life.
Not with urgency.
Not with noise.
But with noticing:
The small ache of morning in the body.
The weight of another living thing trusting me with its warmth.
The pause before thought rushes in to fill the room.

Reaching, I’m learning, is not always about wanting more.
Sometimes it’s about choosing what I get to touch first:
A furry companion.
A sentence.
A blank page.
A lover.

Whatever the light touches, I let myself see it—
as if it’s the first time,
because it is the first time
that day.

All of it becomes soft evidence that I am still here,
that the day has not yet made its demands.

Then I notice the light on me,
revealing what had been waiting
for my attention.

I reach for it without grasping.
Without scrolling.
Without disappearing from myself.

Just light.
Just breath.
Just living—softly.

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There’s something magical about getting lost in a film. The flicker of light, the hush of an expectant audience (or, let’s be real, the cozy solitude of your couch), and the unfolding of a world so different from your own…it’s an experience that goes beyond mere entertainment. For creatives stuck in a rut, cinema can be more than a passive pastime; it can be a powerful tool for reigniting inspiration.

Last Christmas, I gifted us indie cinema memberships, and ever since, each screening has felt like a small feast for the creative soul. Watching films shoulder-to-shoulder with a room full of strangers—hearing everyone react in real time—has become part of the richness of it for me. But you can absolutely tap into that same spark from your favorite streaming service if that feels more accessible. Inspiration doesn’t care where you press play.

The Power of Visual Stimulation

Creativity thrives on input. When the well feels dry, sometimes the best remedy is to fill it with new imagery, perspectives, and emotions. Films do this effortlessly. The striking color palettes of Wes Anderson, the dreamy realism of Wong Kar-wai, or the quiet natural poetry of Chloe Zhao—all of these can provide the visual shake-up necessary to spark new ideas.

Try this: Watch a film with a focus on composition and lighting. Pause at random frames and analyze them. How is the shot framed? What does the use of color or shadow evoke? Take notes or sketch a scene. The simple act of studying cinematography can translate into fresh ideas for photography, painting, or even storytelling.

Emotional Resonance as a Creative Trigger

Beyond visuals, films move us emotionally and emotion is the birthplace of creativity. A heart-wrenching drama, a whimsical animated adventure, or a gripping thriller can stir something deep inside, pushing us to create in response to what we feel.

If you’re creatively blocked, watch a movie that has made a lasting impression on you. Then, instead of simply absorbing it, ask yourself: What about this film resonated? Was it the pacing, the characters, the dialogue? Try to channel that same energy into your work—write a short piece inspired by a character’s dilemma, photograph a scene that embodies the film’s mood, or experiment with storytelling in a new way.

The Creative Ritual of Rewatching

Sometimes, it’s not about discovering something new but revisiting something familiar with fresh eyes. Rewatching a beloved film can reveal details missed before, deepening your understanding of its artistry.

Consider making rewatching a ritual when in a creative slump. Choose a film that once inspired you and observe how your perspective has shifted over time. What new details emerge? How do you feel watching it now? Use this reflection to fuel your next project.

Cinema as an Escape and a Mirror

Great films transport us, but they also reflect aspects of ourselves. When feeling uninspired, watching a movie that contrasts with your mood can be revitalizing. If you feel stuck in a mundane routine, immerse yourself in a fantastical world; if overwhelmed, watch a slow, meditative film to recalibrate.

Next time you hit a creative block, try treating film as more than just a distraction. Let it be your muse, your teacher, your emotional reset. Inspiration might just be a frame away.

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Watched in November:
Sorry, Baby
Frankenstein
Frankenstein: The Anatomy Lesson
Sentimental Value
Hamnet

If you need film recs, my letterboxd is basically a cozy little library of everything I’ve ever been obsessed with. Go explore 📽️ And if cinema is one of your love languages too, subscribe. Let’s build a world where inspiration is a daily practice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about space lately. How the artist needs it, hoards it and expands inside it. How in some cities you have to fight for even a corner of it, creatively, emotionally and financially.
But New York?
It hands you space in a completely different way. Not physical space (God knows how expensive real estate is), but creative space, the kind that’s measured in possibility rather than square footage.

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In New York, artistry isn’t a rarity to be explained or justified. It’s baseline. The default. The air everyone is breathing.

You don’t have to shrink here.
Or translate yourself.
You don’t have to soften the edges to fit in.
You can be big. You can be loud. You can be weird.
You can be brilliant. And no one looks twice because they’re too busy being big, loud, weird and brilliant themselves.

Maybe that’s what strikes me the most about the city, the abundance.
Abundance of walkability, of color, of style, of languages layered over each other, of people not afraid to be seen. You can walk down one block and overhear creatives discussing a potential broadway play in the works, a breakup, someone cussing out at pigeons and a operatic duo rehearsing out loud like the whole world depends on it. You can get lost in a museum and then step right into a deli line filled with people who are dressed better than anyone at Fashion Week.

Artistry isn’t tucked away in studios or galleries. You experience it on the street corner, on the subway, in cafes at 10 am where someone is editing their memoir and pitching it to a friend. It’s everywhere.

And being immersed in that kind of environment does something to you. It unclogs the part of your brain that’s been running on fumes. It reminds you that you’re not strange for wanting more. It gives you permission to be the fullest, boldest version of yourself.

Not every artist can—or wants to—live in New York. But every artist can visit.
If your cup is slowly draining where you live, come to New York for a refill. When you’re surrounded by that much possibility, that much expression, that much raw humanity, something in you widens. That part of you that shrinks in quieter cities suddenly stretches again. You breathe deeper, notice more. And when you leave, you take a little of that expansiveness with you.

After a quick trip, I flew home remembering that artistry isn’t a hobby, it’s a way of being. New York didn’t give me more space, it reminded me I deserve to take it.

Roundup of things I did in NYC:

• Devoured Sergio Larraín’s Andanzas at ICP

• Admired all the sculptures I could spy

• Walked away with a few things from Muji

• Kept it cool when I met Bre at Autophoto Museum

• Ate happily at Calle Dao

• Got Nails from Le Nail

• Serendipitously met with Hannah & ZZ at rooftop bar

• Spied on Julliard offices after watching Ragtime with Joshua Henry

• Chatted with Sam Tutty & Christiani Pitts after enjoying Two Strangers (go see it!)

• Finally got photos at the iconic MTV Photobooth

If you’ve ever traveled somewhere that reminded you who you are, drop it below.
Let’s build a list!

There’s a moment in every artist’s life when they stand before their creation and no longer recognize it. The work that once felt like devotion becomes distance; the photograph that once pulsed with truth now feels foreign. What began as an act of love turns into something else—something alive, but estranged. Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited Frankenstein is about that moment.

For decades, del Toro has called Mary Shelley’s story the one that shaped him most. In his hands, Frankenstein becomes not just a gothic horror, but an anatomy of creation, of a mirror held up to the artist’s own heart. It is a story about making something beautiful, powerful, and new… and then realizing you made it for the wrong reasons.

The Spark: Ego as Creation’s Fire
Every work of art begins with a spark: that flicker of I can do this differently. It’s easy to call that spark inspiration, but often, it’s ego in disguise. The same ego that drove Victor Frankenstein to animate flesh is the one that drives artists to chase originality, mastery, and recognition.

Del Toro has said this film is “the culmination of a journey that has occupied most of my life.” There’s both humility and hubris in that statement: the devotion of a lifetime, but also the audacity to believe one can finally perfect what others couldn’t.

Ego, at its best, gives us the courage to begin. It’s the pulse that insists we have something worth saying. The danger is mistaking that pulse for purpose. When ego becomes the engine rather than the ignition, creation warps. We start making art to prove, not to express; to impress, not to understand.

Victor’s downfall wasn’t that he created life. It was that he created it to glorify himself, motivated by his trauma to outdo his father. The artist’s downfall is rarely different.

The Creature: When the Work Outgrows the Maker

In Shelley’s novel, the creature is neither villain nor victim. It’s an echo of its maker, the embodiment of his longing, pride, and rejection. Del Toro’s retelling reportedly leans into this relationship, exploring what happens when creation gains consciousness and begins to question its origin.

Every artist knows that turning point. The work takes on a life of its own. What you made begins to speak back. It no longer belongs entirely to you. The series, the exhibition, the song, the persona—they start to demand things you didn’t foresee.

Perhaps that’s the truest horror: not the monster, but the mirror. Our work reveals the parts of us we tried to transcend but couldn’t: the vanity, the hunger, the need to be adored. And when that reflection becomes too honest, too monstrous, we turn away.

Victor abandoned his creature the moment it mirrored his own ugliness. Artists often do the same. We distance ourselves from projects that no longer flatter our image or yield validation. We call them failures when, in truth, they’re only honest.

The Hubris: The Artist as God and Orphan

To create is to play god. To summon something from nothing, and yet, every act of creation carries the seed of exile. The artist births the work but can’t remain inside it. The child walks away. The film premieres.
The photo is posted, consumed, scrolled past.

Del Toro’s interpretation centers on the cost of ambition, the loneliness of those who make something larger than themselves. There’s a tenderness in his version, an understanding that hubris isn’t evil but tragic. It isolates the maker from their own creation.

Art made from ego seeks to conquer. Art made from empathy seeks to connect.
Both can be beautiful, but only one will last.

When we chase magnitude—followers, applause, permanence—we mistake visibility for meaning. The work becomes a monument to ourselves instead of a conversation with the world. It glitters, but it doesn’t glow.

IV. The Redemption: Letting the Creature Speak

Del Toro’s cinema is full of compassion for monsters.
He never condemns them; he listens.
In Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and now Frankenstein,
the so-called monsters reveal more humanity than their creators.

Maybe that’s the lesson.
The ego isn’t the enemy. Silence is.
The answer isn’t to suppress the part of us that wants to be seen,
but to stay in dialogue with it, to let the creature speak back.

What if we approached our art and our egos as collaborators instead of adversaries?
What if we could hold ambition and humility in the same hand, the way del Toro holds horror and tenderness in a single frame?

Ego says, Make something that matters.
Soul replies, Make something real.

Both voices are necessary. One ignites. The other sustains.

V. The Reflection: Choosing What We Create From

For any artist—photographer, painter, writer, filmmaker—ego is the clay we sculpt with. It gives shape, structure, drive. But it must be fired in empathy if it’s to endure.

Victor Frankenstein’s tragedy wasn’t that he created a monster, but that he refused to love what he made. His ego couldn’t bear its imperfection. Our tragedy, as modern creators, might be the same. We curate, edit, and polish until only the flattering remains. We make art not to confront ourselves, but to escape ourselves.

Creation was never meant to be an escape. It’s a reckoning. A photograph, a poem, a film—they’re mirrors asking, Who are you becoming through me?

If del Toro’s Frankenstein is the culmination of his life’s obsessions, perhaps it marks a kind of peace with his own creature—the body of work that has followed him, haunted him, and defined him. Maybe that’s what we all want: to stand before what we’ve made and see not vanity, but vulnerability; not perfection, but the audacity to keep living, to stay soft, even in the face of what terrifies us.

Art born from ego alone will always feel unfinished, a creature abandoned at the threshold. But when we return to it with humility, when we listen to what it reveals rather than what it praises, something miraculous happens. The monster becomes human again.

Perhaps that’s the quiet miracle of del Toro’s Frankenstein: a reminder that to create is to risk seeing ourselves in what we make and to love it anyway.

In the end, every artist is a kind of Frankenstein, stitching light to shadow, ego to empathy, until the work rises and breathes. The question isn’t whether we’ll make monsters, but whether we’ll stay long enough to teach them how to love.

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See your reflection clearly. Create anyway.

Grief, you tyrant.
You hold me captive with memories that ache, the profound loss coming in waves that won’t relent.
Still, I return to you willingly
because within your grasp
is the only place
she still feels close.
I wear her lipstick like armor,
the same shade that once kissed my cheek with a blessing.
Now it blooms in my lips,
as inheritance.
Its color bleeds,
softly into the cracks of time,
reminding me:
she lived,
loved
and left, 
traces of herself
in everything that still shines red.

Grief, you may hold me captive,
but she’s the reason I stay.

Transmuting grief into art is like being forced to eat glass. But I did it. Just in time for her birthday, the first one without her. Cruel but necessary. The work wanted to be many things at once, like a metaphor of grief itself, and I let it be.

Technically speaking, it was a difficult session.
For one, I don’t do self-portraits well. In 20 years of being a photographer, I’ve never been able to accomplish self portraiture with the devotion it demands. I only have them if I’m finishing a roll of film or see a mirror, usually taken on the iPhone. Then there’s the quality of the work. I had an idea for it but it required patience. I was manually focusing each frame and running back within 5 seconds to capture it. Add the parenting component of it all that is the soundtrack to my life and the act in itself feels more like walking a tightrope while juggling. Oh, an time! The social construct invented to haunt me, yeah that. I had only an hour to accomplish the task. I harnessed the power of muscle memory to remember some old modeling techniques to contort my body at the right angle while not moving far enough from the focal plane because, I’m manually focusing folks. I’m sure there are infinite way to efficiently execute the vision but this was the way I knew how to. Maybe if I was better at self-portraits perhaps it would’ve been easier. It wasn’t. Toes cramped, breath held for far too long and the kids asked for things they’ve never asked before. I’m quite satisfied with it to tell you the truth. That’s grief, this time around, pulling me back within while life continues on outside. It’s so far different from the wavelengths of grief I’ve experienced before. And it has weighed heavy on me to create from this place of surrender to it. First, the poems came violently. Then the movie scenes in between the poems and the photos. The photos are always present, so it never arrives early or too late. I’m letting the work be what it wants to be. It chooses to surface in a way I’ve never experienced before. I’ll leave you with that, afraid to ruin it with overexplanation.

For those learning to fail beautifully.
To forgive themselves faster.
To see being wrong not as a wound, but as a teacher.
This one’s for the artists of imperfection, the ones still showing up.

There’s an art to failing well.
No one teaches you that. You have to learn it by living through the ache of your own missteps: the email you regret sending, the idea that didn’t land, the way silence filled the room when you thought you were making sense.

Failure humbles you in ways success never can. Humility happens to be the word for the year. It strips you of the illusion that you need to be impressive to belong.
And in that quiet, where pride collapses and curiosity steps in, you realize: being wrong is just another way of being alive.

At my new job, I’ve been wrong more times than I can count.
I’ve sent drafts that missed the mark, asked questions that revealed what I didn’t know, and had to start over when I thought I was already done.
But here’s the truth: every mistake has made me softer. More observant. Less afraid.
There’s a freedom in no longer needing to be right all the time, a strange & steady kind of confidence that comes from knowing you can recover.

Failure, I’m learning, is not a verdict. It’s a practice.
It’s the art of returning to yourself after disappointment.
The art of seeing what you missed, not with shame, but with wonder, as if failure were just another form of feedback from the world saying, “Try again. But truer this time.”

Maybe this is what mastery actually looks like:
Not perfection, but the grace to keep showing up flawed, curious, and unafraid to learn in public.

So here’s to getting it wrong.
To the drafts we’ll rewrite, the lessons we’ll relearn, the small humiliations that grow us into wiser versions of ourselves.

Because every failure, if you stay open to it, becomes a doorway.
And on the other side is a you that listens deeper, works gentler, and trusts longer.

If you’re in a season of failing forward, you’re not alone.
We’re all apprentices to the art of beginning again.
🕊️
What’s something you got wrong lately and what did it teach you?
Reply or comment below. I’d love to hear your lesson.

There’s a moment every artist meets: when control becomes a cage.
When the pursuit of a “perfect frame” starts to dim the spark that made you lift the camera in the first place.

I felt it recently — that quiet ache of overthinking. The weight of expectation in my hands, the voice in my head whispering: Make it good. Make it worth it.

So I tried something different.
I stopped looking.

✦ The Invitation

Next time you’re out shooting, whether it’s your neighborhood, your partner, your morning light, try this: don’t look through the viewfinder.
Let instinct take over.
Hold the camera at your waist or above your head. Feel the sound of the shutter more than the sight of the image.

This isn’t about being careless, it’s about letting go of control long enough to remember that seeing isn’t just visual. It’s visceral.

You might get a blur, a misfire, an image that feels like a mistake.
But sometimes, that’s where truth hides, in the frame you didn’t plan.

✦ Why It Works

When we stop trying to capture something and instead experience it, photography becomes meditation.
You start to notice:

• the texture of air before the rain,

• the rhythm of footsteps passing,

• the way light brushes across skin instead of floods it.

You’re not documenting anymore. You’re listening.

And in that listening — you return to yourself.

✦ A Reflection Prompt

After your experiment, ask yourself:

What surprised me about letting go?
Which image felt most alive — even if it wasn’t the “best”?
What would it look like to bring that same trust into my creative life beyond the camera?

Write your answers. Or better yet — post your favorite “blind shot” in the comments and tell us what you felt.

Sometimes, the camera doesn’t need your eyes.
It just needs your surrender.
And maybe that’s what creativity has been asking for all along —
to stop watching so hard, and start feeling again.

💬 Have you ever photographed without looking?
Did it change how you saw the world, or yourself?
Share your thoughts below, I read every comment.