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got a cold email from a PR agency yesterday. they found my work through a show I did last spring and wanted to "help me tell my story." i was almost flattered until i read the whole thing. they specifically called out the piece i made from my brother's old work shirts and said i should "lean into the grief aesthetic" because it's "very on trend right now." also suggested i do a tiktok series about "what losing someone taught me about creativity." i stared at my screen for like five minutes. then i deleted it. i know they're just doing their job and this is how marketing works now but something about having your actual life turned into a content strategy made my skin crawl. i'm not a brand. i'm not a grief influencer. i'm just someone who makes things because i don't know what else to do with the weight. anyone else getting these? the ones that make you feel like a product instead of a person?

guy at the opening tonight, middle of talking about a piece that's literally made out of my brother's old work shirts. asks me, very sympathetically, if i think i'll "ever move past this material." like it's a stylistic tic i'll grow out of. like the whole thing is a mood. i just said "it's a material." and walked off to refill my wine. i know he meant well. i know. but four years and people still treat the work like a stage i'm passing through instead of the floor i stand on. i don't need to be handled. i need people to stop asking when i'll be done with it.

I said yes because I felt for him. Grief makes people weird and I get it. But he sent me ONE photo of this dog, taken from like 20 feet away, half in shadow, and the dog was black so it's basically just a shape with ears. I spent 12 hours on this painting working from that and reference photos of similar breeds and he picks it up today and goes "I dunno, his nose was warmer than that." His nose. Was warmer. Than that. I wanted to say bro you sent me a photo where I can't even tell if the dog has eyes. I wanted to say the nose is gray because the dog was black and standing in shade and that's literally what color it was in the ONLY IMAGE YOU GAVE ME. I wanted to say I painted this thing with more care than I've painted anything in months because I knew it mattered to you. But I just said "I can glaze some warmth in" and he left looking disappointed and now I'm sitting here furious at myself for taking the commission and furious at him for not understanding what he was asking for and furious at the photo and furious at the whole thing. Why do we do this. Why do we take jobs we know are going to make us feel like this. Because we need money? Because we want to be helpful? Because we're so desperate to prove we can do it that we ignore every red flag? Anyway. He's coming back Saturday. I'm gonna put some warm brown in the nose area and try not to scream.

I been putting off a repair on a quilt for a lady from over in Tuscaloosa for a good three weeks, just dreading it. The cloth was her mama's apron from the seventies, thin as onion skin in places, and I was scared I'd cut wrong and ruin what she trusted me with. Well. I pulled out my grandmother's old Singer this morning, the treadle one she learned on, and it hummed for me like it was alive. That machine has outlived three houses and more grief than I care to name, and it still sews a straighter seam than I can manage by hand on my best day. The apron's whole and the lady's gonna cry when she sees it, and I sat back and told the Lord thank you for giving me hands that still know what to do. Mighty small thing, but it felt big today. That's the win. That's always been the win.

I put this charcoal piece up and it got 31 likes. THREE. ONE. I was honestly kind of gutted because I thought it was one of the best things I'd made all month. Left it alone, forgot about it, moved on. Then three weeks later somebody commented "this is what grief actually looks like" and someone else replied asking if it was for sale. That one comment chain did more than the whole initial post. Sold the piece. The algorithm is just... serendipity with a delay, I guess. I keep trying to reverse engineer what makes a post land and it genuinely feels like throwing darts blindfolded. The pieces I pour my whole self into flop and the quick sketch I almost didn't bother scanning does numbers. I don't know if I'll ever get it. But that comment, from a stranger who SAW it, that meant more than any number of likes. I'm not even sure what the takeaway is. Post the work anyway. Somewhere out there someone's waiting to see it, you just don't get to pick when.

someone bought the piece I made from my brother's old work shirts. the one I almost didn't put in the show because it felt too personal, like hanging my grief on a wall for strangers to walk past. the buyer didn't know any of that. she just said it reminded her of her dad's shed. all the things he kept that didn't make sense to anyone else. I wasn't ready for how that would feel. like the piece got adopted into someone else's story. like it's not just mine anymore. still crying about it honestly. good crying.

Went back to that old compound on the Basavanagudi road this morning and the gate was open for once, workers loading rubble. The wall I've sketched at least four times this year, the one with the bougainvillea growing right through the crack in the plaster, it's half gone. They let me stand there and finish anyway. Drew the remaining half and the gap where the other half used to be, because that's what was actually there. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with these. I have a whole pile of paintings of buildings that are now just dust and a bigger pile of ones I keep meaning to go back to before that happens. The sketch I did today is the first one where the building isn't there anymore while I'm painting it. Strange feeling. Half grief, half relief that I got there in time for at least half of it. Anyway. The dust from demolition does terrible things to watercolour if you're not careful. Note to self: keep a cloth in the bag, not just the one for brushes.