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took down a reel that hit 12k views the other day. it was me assembling a torn-paper piece, sped up, and it got the biggest reach i've had in months. and the comments were full of people asking for the finished piece and the story behind it and i just... couldn't. because the piece was about my brother and i wasn't ready to hand that to strangers holding phones at 2am. so i deleted it. and i've been second-guessing it all week because that's the whole game right, you're supposed to chase the reach. but i made the thing for me. the sharing part was the part i never wanted. not posting the process anymore. or at least not that one. some things stay in the studio, even if the algorithm would've loved them.

Eight months. That's how long a gallery here kept telling me "we love the work, just waiting on the space to open up" before I finally stopped emailing them. Then last month I saw they'd hung three pieces by someone doing the same torn-paper thing I do, basically the versions I showed them. I know how this sounds. Bitter artist yells at cloud. But the thing that actually got me was the realization that I'd built my whole schedule around their maybe. I stopped pitching elsewhere. I put real work into preparing pieces for an opening that was never going to happen. The irony is I made the best thing I've made in a year the week I gave up on them and just started making for nobody. Should've told them to kick rocks in month two instead of eight. Learning the slow way that a maybe is not a yes.

A woman bought a piece from me three years ago, one of the small torn-paper ones I was never fully sure about. Yesterday she sent me a photo of it hanging in her new place, over a fireplace, next to this big ugly-gorgeous plant. She wrote "it's lived in three homes with me now." I don't know why that hit me the way it did. The piece wasn't my favorite. But she's moved it every time, found a wall for it each place. That's more than I can say for some of the pieces I'm actually proud of, which are sitting in my studio in a pile because I don't know what to do with them. Anyway I just sat there staring at the photo for a while. Felt weirdly less alone in the work. That's all.