I started creating a list of things I want to have at the mar…

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Since starting my journey with creating art every single day and sharing it, I have wanted to quit more times than I can count. I look around and wonder what the fuck am I doing, I question myself every day, multiple times a day, if I should keep going and whether it all really matters in the end.

I recently lost a dear friend of mine. She was a young mother. Both of our daughters were in ballet class together. We would talk during their class time, and our friendship felt so at ease and genuine.

Unfortunately, she is gone now, and it has made me really think of what I am doing with my life. What it means to live a life that is fulfilled and how I am spending my time. Is it slaving in a nine to five and then cooking, cleaning, performing, showing up for my children, and still somehow remain present to myself. This loss has opened my eyes to how I spend my time, where I feel lost, how I feel alone, what makes me happy, and why I still create.

After all of this, I feel like I am starting to finally understand what life is about and not to give a fuck about what people think of me or my art. For the longest time, I did care what people thought of me and my art. Now, I just care what I think

I cannot quit. I know that for myself, I need to create. I want to show up and share just a little part of my world, in the perfect french aesthetics.

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Live life boldly! Do what makes you happy. Post what you want to post. Share what you need to share, and know that out there, maybe someone needed to hear your story.

À bientôt,

Hf

I love seeing how someone can become so enchanted by something that it alters their brain chemistry. The kind of fascination where you cannot stop thinking about it. Where one question can turn into more, or how it can lead into directions you have never thought about and suddenly, it leads you into a place that you cannot escape from.

I think I am beginning this kind of journey through creating art every single day.

The more I make, the more details I notice and questions I start to ask. The things I want to try, recreate, or understand more. When I look through art books or see other artists’ work online, I find myself wondering how they got to the final piece. What made them emphasize one small detail? Why did they choose that particular color, texture, or composition? What did the work look like before it became what it is now?

Maybe that is my own hyperfixation: seeing how other artists get to the final stage of an artwork. The mediums they use. Whether they mix different materials together. The small decisions that either make or break a piece. (I have thrown away some art.) I am currently working on one, where I think I have ruined it, but I am going to trust the process and finish the piece and then decide if I hate my mistake, or think it is beautiful.

What kind of hyperfixations are you interested in? I would love to know! It can be anything! Even the color blue. It is one of my hyperfixations! I recently got two philosophical books that talk about the color blue. I haven’t read them yet, but I have them ready when I am ready to pick up and discover more about the color and how much it is influencing me.

À bientôt,

Hf

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Now I want to share some of the books because I feel that people do not talk about them enough.

• One that I found out about this year is The Book of Promethea by Hélène Cixous, a French author. This book is probably her well known works than other books out there. She writes about two women through love and language through distance. Cixous writes about how relationships can feel inadequate through deep emotions and learns to bridge that gap.

• Her Side of the Story by Alba de Céspedes, an Italian writer. I read another one of her books that I absolutely loved. If you love Elena Ferrante, you will love de Céspedes. The main character is a young woman who watches the rise and fall of fascism while also watching her mother struggle through a toxic marriage. de Céspedes writes in a way that every detail feels intimate.

• Adrift by Valeria Correa Fiz, a Spanish poet. This book of poems carries emotions that feels slightly untethered and expressing desire, loss, and exile.

• A Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, the French writer and philosopher born in Paris, remains one of the most devastating portraits of female disillusionment I’ve read. It captures betrayal, loneliness, and the collapse of identity with such brutal emotional clarity through aging.

• If Not, Winter is a book I will never shut up about: Sappho, an ancient Greek poet still resinates today because we are still trying to put the human experience in words. Anne Carson’s gorgeous translation (will write more about Anne Carson, because I feel people don’t talk about her enough). The fragments feel intimate and immortal at once, full of longing, beauty, and of course the human experience. It is one of the most poetic book I know!

• Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, from Croatia delves into a character who is left paralyzed and not able to speak and is locked in a way where she sees her family in a different light, but also see how they too are locked in their own life

• Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is an Argentine writer. I read this book last year and left me feeling very uneasy, not about the plot, but how unforgettable it is through its sharpness and grotesques. One of those books to check the trigger warnings. Beneath its horror, it feels like a brutal study of power, cruelty, and what people learn to normalize.

I have always been drawn to translated works. I feel like I can experience more of life through books from different languages and backgrounds. Come to think of it, I think it helps me feel less alone in the world. I feel we are all experiencing the same thing through time and space. We love, grieve, hope, long, and desire the same way. Since Sappho, we are still trying to understand the human experience maybe just living and being present will get us closer to that understanding.

I would love to know if you have heard of any of these or if you have read any of them!

À bientôt,

Hf

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By month three, I truly thought I was going to quit and just move on with my life. A dear friend of mine told me not to give up. So in July of 2025, I went to a fancy ass bougie stationery store. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but a beautiful yellow and blue box caught my eye. The more I looked at it and felt the paper, I knew it was what I wanted. It was Rossi 1931 Italian deckled paper.

It was extremely expensive, and they were all single cards. I didn’t know if I could print them on my printer, but I had a vision and I wanted to see it through.

Unfortunately, the single cards got stuck in my printer, and I had to take it apart just to get the paper out. I was frustrated and wondering how on earth I was going to print on them, because I knew you could. It said printer ready, and the stationery store even used them for custom wedding and special occasion printing. So I searched high and low for a way to make it work. Eventually, I found out that my printer couldn’t handle the thickness, and the quality wouldn’t come out the way I wanted it to.

Even so, I couldn’t let go of the vision. I kept looking online for wholesale options and for anyone who had shared how to print on this paper. I found a wholesaler, and I learned that I could print four cards at a time. Things started to go well, but after a few months of using the paper with my new printer, it became much more time-consuming. The printer was still finicky with the paper. It would spit my paper out and create an error message multiple times before it finally took the paper in just the right way.

I was fucking frustrated, and rightfully so. I hate printers with a burning passion. STILL DO!

By January of this year, I finally got another printer that could handle the thickness of this gorgeous paper, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I hope that you love this paper just as much as I do, and if you have any questions I’d be happy to answer them. I’ll talk more about this paper and what I have used it for!

À bientôt,

Hf

Since I started sharing more of my art (I promise I'll write another article on my art process), I've started connecting and building relationships with other artists. They are some of the best people to hang with.

One friend in particular isn't necessarily a painter or sketch artist, but they are an artist in the music scene and in modeling. They told me about a live nude model drawing workshop they had been attending. I was ecstatic and nervous. I had never done anything like it before, and I knew I would be surrounded by other talented artists.

The truth is, I didn't grow up drawing nude figures.

I grew up in a high-demand religion where modesty was always pushed to the forefront of my life. Being very curvy and having a large chest (I was a triple E before my reduction surgery) felt like a curse. I wished for smaller boobs and spent years trying to cover myself up and make myself smaller so men and boys wouldn't notice me. It became one of my biggest insecurities.

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Now the air has warmed up again, and it’s been sending me back, like a scent memory, to summers where everything felt lighter, like the whole neighborhood had taken a collective exhale. The heat settles into the asphalt, the sky goes soft around the edges, and suddenly there’s laughter everywhere. It finally feels like I’m living in the present, even when I’m remembering the past.

I think about ten, fifteen years ago, driving through the mountains after a day on the lake—paddle boarding, swimming until my skin felt like it belonged to the water more than to me. Stopping for those foot-long Subway sandwiches. I fucking miss those five-dollar sandwiches. They were never glamorous, but they were perfect in that way only cheap, reliable food can be: wrapped in crinkly paper, eaten with wet hair and sunburned cheeks, the kind of meal that tastes so good.

The drive home always felt like the best part. Windows down. Music blasting or just barely humming under the conversations. Sometimes the car was loud and sometimes it was quiet, the music tucked low into the background while the mountains turned dark and the sky did that slow blue that fades into purple that only summer seems to get right.

There is a particular kind of peace in that early evening light, when the sun is leaving but not gone, when your body is pleasantly tired from swimming or from just being outside too long, and the air coming in through the windows feels like a reward. Warm, but not suffocating. Heavy with grass and pavement and whatever everyone else is cooking for dinner. A car full of people you love, or even just you alone, with a playlist that feels like it knows you better than you know yourself.

I miss those drives. I miss the version of me who didn’t feel like she had to be constantly fixing or improving something, who could just let herself be carried through the canyon with her favorite song turned up to “reckless.” I miss the ease of laughing with friends in the front seat, hanging with my kids in the back, talking about nothing and everything while the day slowly surrendered itself to night.

This is another way I’m romanticizing my summer: letting myself remember those evenings and using them as a kind of template for now. Because you don’t have to be doing anything elaborate to earn a magical night. You don’t need a lake day or a Subway sandwich or a road trip. Sometimes it’s enough to roll the windows down on your way home from the grocery store, let the warm air wash over your arm, and play one song that makes your chest loosen.

You don’t have to feel like you’re accomplishing anything. You don’t have to post it. You don’t have to document it. You just have to be present for it.

This summer’s version is different. Maybe it’s a shorter drive, a quieter car, a different playlist, new mountains or no mountains at all. Maybe it’s just you on your street, circling the block once or twice with the windows down, letting the evening touch your face. That still counts. That’s still magic.

If you’re looking for a way to romanticize your own summer, start small:

One warm evening.

One open window.

One song you love more than you can explain.

And the decision to let yourself be there for it, fully—no improvement plan, no performance, no productivity, just you and the breeze and the feeling that, for a moment, your life fits you exactly right.

I created a little playlist if you would like to listen to the music old I listened to at nineteen and the ones I play now.

playlist: Summer Nights

À bientôt,

Hf

But last year something in me tipped toward the sun. I started sitting in the heat and I fell hard for tomatoes. The way they soak up the salt with olive oil and basil. And cheese, of course. Always add the cheese to everything.

I wanted all of the dresses, especially the soft blue jean dress that sticks to the backs of my legs when I finally peel myself out of the lawn chair after watching my kids on the water slide I bought from Costco. It’s such a specific kind of happiness: slightly damp children shrieking in the yard, bright towels, a plastic slide that will probably die by September.

This summer feels like standing inside a held breath. The bugs buzz close to my garden and the five tomato plants I keep checking on like a nervous parent. I hold my matcha with tonic—just trust me, it is so good—and let the glass sweat onto my palm. For the first time, I stay in the sun. I don’t rush back into the air‑conditioning. I sit there in my blue jean dress, tomato juice on my wrist, letting the summer do what it does.

I’m not doing it in a productivity way, not in a “hot girl walk” way. I mean sitting on the back step long enough for the backs of my knees to sweat and the first mosquito to find me. I mean not reaching for my phone the second the boredom pricks. I let the boredom swell, watch it crest and break like heat lightning in the corner of my eye.

Sometimes I do nothing except track the shadows. The line of shade from the fence inching across the grass. The blue of my dress shifting from bright to washed‑out as the sun tips toward evening. I listen: a lawnmower stuttering somewhere down the block, a dog shaking its collar, the thin metallic clink of ice settling in a glass inside. It feels like the opposite of ambition and somehow more demanding—this practice of staying still enough to feel my own life, in the heat, in the blue dress, with the tomatoes ripening just a few feet away.

When I close my eyes, I can still smell the old summers: the sting of chlorine in my nose, the rubber of my cap, the white streaks of sunscreen my coach kept telling us to rub in. Lane lines cutting the water into bright, merciless strips. Back then, summer was something I had to get through. Now it’s the same sun on different skin. I am not racing it anymore. I am just here, sitting in the light, letting it touch the parts of me that used to stay underwater.

May your tomatoes always be ripe.

À bientôt,

Hf

My English can feel too ordinary, too flat.

My French can feel too broken, too delayed, too textbook.

And yet, somehow, all of my poems live in the space between the two.

I draft in English because it’s the language of my everyday life: my children, my grocery lists, my Salt Lake City mornings, my conversations with friends. It’s the language that shows up when I’m too tired to think.

But there are moments when I use French because it just hits harder than the English version. When writing poetry, there’s often a moments where I am referencing my d textbooks or word reference since there are so many ways of saying or explaining something that cannot be explained. i remember this one time in French class where a student said that she was excited. She said it in the form of being sexually aroused. The teacher quickly informed her that the correct word for being excited about something is enthousiaste.

I’m that moment I knew that I had to make sure the feelings and words need to be expressed in the correct way so that I don’t get the wrong word across to mean something completely different.

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For many readers, Didion was the first woman who made observation feel like an art form. She could describe normal everyday activities, pain, suffering from a migraine, going to the grocery store, interview political figures or their wives, and somehow reveal the entire palpable emotions of America beneath it.

Then there is Annie Ernaux.

Where Didion wrote California into some fever dream, Ernaux wrote ordinary life into evidence. Yet, both women because the pillars of the societies that raised them. Both understood that could not escape reality (like the majority of us) but about studying it closely.

One lived among the dry heat and growing spectacle of America, the other moved through the restrained interiors of France. Both women knew how to study and understand the world around them because they could not escape reality.

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Didion’s work feels like a camera moving across everything she sees and hears. Trying to capture the swift moments (often not) of loneliness, excess, and collapse. She reveals how quickly we move on from devastation, or bury it beneath drugs, parties, and performances of control our reality of loneliness and fractured relationships.

Ernaux’s work is a little bit more subtle but no less devastating.

She writes grocery stores, abortions, shame, desire, class, and memory with such clarity because she does not want to forget. Reading her feels less like observing someone else’s life and more of you becoming her, you can feel exactly where she was, holding a train ticket, looking at piles of discarded clothes on the floor, the texture of a kitchen table. Nothing is too insignificant to hold meaning.

Both understood that personal life is inseparable from the political and cultural moment surrounding it. They wrote themselves as products of their environments. Women who watched their part of the world transform around them.

I hope that if you love Didion, you will be moved by Ernaux.

Here are some book recommendations

“Keep on nodding terms with the people you used to be.” —Didion

“Je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance.” (I have no childhood memories) —Ernaux

I hope that you maybe found some books to pick up at your local library or look for as your next purchase. I hope their works inspire you to write about your own life.

À bientôt,

Hf

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For a long time, I thought this meant I was inconsistent. That maybe I was not disciplined enough, not serious enough, not committed enough to one thing. I would try oil pastels, then want to sketch. I would become interested in printmaking, making my own poetry/art books, then find myself pulled toward watercolor, working with plaster, and even jewelry making.

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But I am beginning to think this was never a flaw.

I think this is how some of us arrive.

There is a strange vulnerability in being a beginner over and over again. Every new medium asks something different of you. One teaches patience. Another teaches looseness. Another exposes how much control you to let go or want. Another reveals where you are too precious, too rigid, too afraid to make something bad.

Trying different forms of art has not only shown me what I like to make. It has shown me how I make. What kinds of textures I return to. What colors feel like me. What moods follow me from piece to piece, even when the materials change.

That, I think, is where style actually begins. By trying. By experimenting.

In noticing that even when you change mediums, certain things remain: the way you show up, the way you try again and again

Style is not just what your work looks like. It is what your work cannot help revealing.

When I look back at the things I have made across different forms, I can see that I have been circling the same feelings all along. Even when the outcome looked different, the interior world was often the same. I have always been reaching for atmosphere. For emotion. For something textured, intimate, and slightly haunted. I have always wanted my work to feel touched by memory.

I have realized that if the medium changes…the voice does not.

Because it means that experimenting is not evidence that you do not have a style. Sometimes it is exactly how you build one.

Every attempt shows us who we are deep down.

The sketch that felt too unfinished may have taught you something about movement. The painting that did not work may still have contained the exact color palette you will use for years. The collage you almost threw away may have held a composition you return to instinctively. Even the pieces that disappoint you are often more useful than you realize while you are making them.

Nothing is wasted when you are paying attention.

I think we speak so often about finding a style as though it is a destination, but maybe it is more like recognition. Maybe your style is already present in fragments before you know how to name it. Maybe it is hidden inside your preferences, your repetitions, your refusals, your obsessions. Maybe it is waiting in the things you make when no one is watching.

And maybe the real work is not forcing a style into existence, but letting yourself gather enough evidence of who you already are.

That is what trying everything has given me.

I now know more clearly what feels like me and what does not. I know which materials invite me in and which make me feel distant from myself. I know the difference between admiring an art form and belonging to it. I know that just because something is beautiful in someone else’s hands does not mean it is mine.

That knowledge is precious.

It saves time, yes, but more than that, it builds intimacy with yourself as an artist.

It teaches you to trust your own pull.

So if you are in a season of trying everything…of making messes, changing your mind, beginning again, feeling drawn in ten directions at once… I do not think you are lost.

I think you may be gathering the language of your own work.

I think you may be learning yourself from different angles.

I think you may be much closer to your style than you realize.

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Still choosing the same blue in my case.

Still blurring the same edges.

Still reaching for the same feeling.

Still telling the truth in whatever material will hold it.

And one day, almost without noticing, you look at what you have made and realize:

This is mine.

Not because it is perfect.

But because it could not have come from anyone else.

À bientôt,

Hf

This is a conversation space exclusively for paid subscribers, like our own private French bleu salon tucked inside this publication. We’ll talk about poésie perdue letters, french words, poems in progress, books on our nightstands, and the art that’s unfolding on my desk.

Think of it as the living room of this publication: a softer, smaller french bleu salon where we can share inspiration, ask questions, and linger over all things petite salon.

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1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

There was a soft white bed tucked against the wall, and a small writing desk in the corner where two large windows looked out onto the lemon grove of the villa. I touched that desk many times while I was there. My hands traced the wood, the varnish, the edges, as if trying to understand the room through touch.

I can still hear the bird outside my window.

I can still feel the soft Mediterranean breeze moving through the room, gently swaying the blue curtains.

On my desk, you would have found my leather journals, a few books, my Freewrite, my Italian deckled cards, and my oil pastels. Everything I needed to write, sketch, think, and disappear for a little while.

It was not a large room.

But it felt complete.

It had a bed, a desk, a window, and a view of lemons. It had blue walls and white sheets. It had morning light. It had enough silence for me to hear myself again.

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Maybe this is why Virginia Woolf’s phrase, “a room of one’s own,” has stayed with so many women. Because the room is never only a room. It is a condition. A permission. A place where the mind can spread itself out without being immediately gathered back up for someone else.

In Sicily, the blue room was mine.

For those five nights at the villa, I could leave my journals open. I could scatter my pastels across the desk. I could wake up slowly and look out at the lemon grove before speaking to anyone. I could be alone without feeling abandoned. I could be private without feeling hidden.

I began to understand that solitude is not the absence of others, but the presence of oneself. And that, for so long, I had been living in a kind of beautiful noise. Conversations, expectations, obligations, even creativity shaped by an invisible audience.

But in the blue room, there was no audience.

Only the sound of birds, the movement of air, the slow shifting of light across the walls.

And me.

until part 3…

à bientôt,

Hf

I am still trying to understand what happened there.

It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Not only because I got my own blue room, though that alone felt like something out of a dream, but because I found myself inside what I can only describe as a salon. A gathering of thinkers, artists, philosophers, seekers. Five women from different corners of the world, each carrying her own history, her own questions, her own relationship to faith, beauty, grief, and creation.

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I did not expect any of it.

And yet, once I was there, it felt as if it could not have happened anywhere else. It felt like the right place, at the right time, with the right people, even though none of us could have arranged it that way.

There was something surreal about how we sat together all day and never grew tired of one another’s company. We talked for hours. We ate together. We wandered through the villa. Sometimes I went off on my own to draw, or to walk through the lemon groves, letting the heat and the scent of citrus move through me.

Then I would return, and the conversation would still be there.

We spoke of creation, religion, trauma, doubt. We spoke of the things that make a person. We listened to one another, and more than that, we gave each other room to be listened to. That is rarer than I realized.

Maybe that was the real blue room.

Not only the room I slept in, with its particular shade of blue, its private atmosphere, its sense of being held. But the room we made between us. A space where thought could unfold without interruption. Where pain did not have to become performance. Where belief and uncertainty could sit at the same table.

For two weeks in Sicily, I had my own blue room.

Until then, see you in part 2.

À bientôt,

Hf

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I have been thinking a lot about why I started this project in the first place. Because I love the French language. Because I believe in the kinds of joy that don’t make a lot of noise, handwritten letters, poetry, the weight of something that took time. I realized I wanted to go deeper into that. Not just to send letters, but to actually learn. To look things up. To follow the thread wherever it led.

So I started looking up salons.

The French literary kind! The ones where people gathered in private homes to talk about ideas, to read poetry aloud, to just be together in a thoughtful way, and that’s when I found her: Catherine de Vivonne. She’s considered the one who started it all, back in 1607. She left the loud, performance-driven, exhausting French court, and she came home. She painted one room blue. She called it la chambre bleue. Poets, philosophers, writers, and nobles all wanted to be there. Maybe because they too also wanted craved something more intentional, more slow.

I sat with that for a while.

Here’s the thing. Every month, I wrap my letters in blue string before I send them out. That’s just something I do, it’s part of how Poésie Perdue looks, feels, lands in someone’s hands. I didn’t think much about why blue. It just felt right and because I love the color.

Then I find out that the very first salon, the one that started a whole tradition of slow, intentional gathering—was a blue room.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I really don’t. I think some things find you when you’re ready for them.

So I’m building something new. I’m calling it Le Salon de Poésie Perdue. A series built on the same things Catherine was reaching for: slowness, intention, real conversation. Not content. Conversation.

This is the beginning of that. I hope you’ll stay for it.

À bientôt,

Hf

We read in books or watch in movies about the hero going through turmoil, wondering if they should keep fighting or give up and let it all burn. Sometimes they do give up. They sit and wait for someone else to fix it, or they run away and hide.

And when all hope seems to be lost, somehow, they tell their brain “no.” They decide they will fight. They push themselves until it is so uncomfortable that every part of them wants to stop…and that’s the moment everything quietly begins to change.

In my own life, the “battle” doesn’t look cinematic. It looks like waking up early for a corporate job, teaching piano in the afternoon, and still finding a sliver of time to make art or write, even when my energy is gone. It looks like sending snail mail to subscribers or posting another piece online when the numbers don’t reflect the effort it took just to show up.

From the outside, it can look like nothing is happening. No viral moment. No big break. No graph shooting straight up. On those days, my brain is very loud:

“See? This isn’t working.”

“Other people are further ahead.”

“Why are you still trying?”

That’s the part of the story we rarely linger on when we talk about success, the long, boring, uncomfortable middle. The part where you’re doing the work, but the reward hasn’t caught up yet. The part where your inner critic is stronger than any external obstacle because it knows exactly where to press.

Here’s what I’m slowly learning: feeling stagnant does not mean you are stagnant. My brain is using “no visible growth” as proof that nothing is happening, but that’s not how growth actually works. Most of the time, progress looks like repetition. It looks like tiny, almost invisible upgrades in skill, courage, and self-trust that don’t show up on a chart right away.

Every time I create something on a day I want to quit, I am proving my brain wrong. Every time I send the thing, post the thing, or share the thing with even a handful of people, I’m rewriting the story from “I quit when it’s hard” to “I keep going when it’s hard.” That might not be dramatic, but it is transformational.

Heroes aren’t heroes because they never doubt themselves. They’re heroes because, in the moment of doubt, they make one small choice that lines up with who they want to become. They take one more step into the dark cave, even while a voice in their head tells them to run back home.

For me, that step might look like:

• Sketching for ten minutes instead of doom scrolling.

• Packing snail mail for one person instead of wishing I had a hundred.

None of those steps feel heroic while I’m doing them. They feel small, ordinary, almost laughable compared to the dream I’m chasing. But stacked over weeks and months, they become the evidence that I didn’t let my brain win. They become the quiet proof that I stayed in the story.

If your brain is also telling you that you’re stuck, that none of it matters, that you’re behind, that you should just stop…I want you to know this: that voice is not the whole truth. It’s just one scared narrator. You’re allowed to tell it “no” and keep moving anyway.

Maybe right now is your uncomfortable middle, the part no one will ever write a headline about. Maybe you’re showing up to your version of the page, the canvas, the studio, the inbox, with very little to show for it. If so, you’re not failing; you’re in the exact chapter where most people quietly bow out.

And you? You’re still here.

I hope this meets you in that space. I’m cheering you on as you keep taking your tiny, heroic steps. One day, I believe we’ll look back and realize this was the part of the story where everything was quietly growing under the surface, even when our brains swore we were standing still.

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À bientôt,

Hf

One thing I’ve committed to, no matter what the spiral is doing, is to create every single day. Some days it’s a finished piece, some days it’s a rough sketch, color studies, editing photos, or planning a series—but I touch my art daily. That daily practice is my proof of progress, even when the external metrics don’t move.

If I judged my progress only by straight-line metrics: month-over-month revenue, follower counts, growth charts…I’d constantly feel like I am failing. I remind myself to take a step back. These slow months are showing me to refine my craft.

Instead of asking, “Why am I not growing in a straight line?”, I’ve started asking:

• Did I make something today, even if it’s small or imperfect?

• Am I learning something from each launch, each show, each experiment?

• When things don’t work, am I changing my approach instead of abandoning the goal?

That’s where the Confucian spirit shows up for me—not in a perfect historical quote, but in the attitude: keep going, keep adjusting, keep learning. Slow is still progress. unfinished pieces is still progress. Circling back is still progress. Daily creating is the thread that ties all of those imperfect days together.

Right now, it may not look like the graph we want to see, but showing up every day is moving the graph up a little bit (even if I don’t see it right now).

I hope this helps you, I’m here to cheer you on your journey. May we all one day look back and see just how much we’ve grown.

À bientôt,

Hf

Art has stripped that away. The work refuses to fit inside a tidy to‑do list. It demands experiments, ugly drafts, wasted paper, supplies left out because I might want them again in an hour. It asks me to follow a feeling instead of a schedule, to keep going when I don’t know where a piece is headed. On paper, that makes me look less put together than ever: stacks of stuff needing to be gone through, laundry waiting to be put away, and ideas scattered across the table like confetti.

But here’s the twist I didn’t see coming: in my body, it feels like a different kind of control. I’m not controlling every object anymore; I’m choosing the direction of my life. I’m letting some things be unfinished so the thing that matters most can actually get finished. I’m trading the calm of a spotless room for the deeper, stranger calm of knowing I am finally steering toward the work I’m here to make…

À bientôt,

Hf

But the first few months were humbling. After four months, I had only six subscribers. I was scared of being seen, of not being good enough, of realizing maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. I worried that my ideas were not good, my writing not compelling enough, or that the space was already too crowded. Each new month brought doubts: could I do as well as or better than the month before?

Around month five, I finally started posting more often. I let myself be awkward and imperfect…something shifted. Slowly, people found me. Within a few months, I had over 400 subscribers. I was so grateful, so hopeful. For a moment, I thought maybe I’d made it.

But by the end of 2025, things changed again. I lost a big portion of my subscribers. On the outside, I told myself (and others) that I was “making room for the new,” but inside, I felt crushed. It’s hard not to take those numbers personally to believe that people didn’t want my words or my art. It still stings.

And yet, deep down, I know this is part of the process. Growth isn’t always linear, and what matters most is continuing to show up. So this is a reminder for me and anyone else who’s struggling to keep going: consistency is the key. Even when it’s hard. Even when it’s quiet. Keep creating. The payoff will come…maybe not in the way you expect, but it will come.

À bientôt,

Hf