Stories, art, and musings from a wandering mind
There's a conference badge from 2016 sitting in my desk drawer, and I've moved it across three states without ever once questioning why. This is an essay about the artifacts we can't discard — and the quiet contracts they represent with the people we used to be.
A voicemail from 2013 has survived five phone upgrades, two cloud migrations, and one very dramatic phone-dropped-in-the-bathtub incident. It's from a friend I no longer talk to, and I've decided she never gets to leave my inbox.
While hunting for batteries, I found a business card for a design studio that never existed and a laminated badge from my freelance years. Each artifact felt like a postcard from an alternate life. Here's what the people I almost became have to do with the person I ended up being.
A letter I mailed in 2014 finally showed up in my mailbox last spring, slightly water-stained and completely intact. Reading it felt less like nostalgia and more like eavesdropping on a stranger with my handwriting. Here's what the U.S. Postal Service taught me about time.
A copy of 'Housekeeping' by Marilynne Robinson has moved with me from a dorm in Ohio to three boroughs and a duplex in Minneapolis, accruing fees I will never pay in any meaningful sense. Last month I finally took it back. This is the story of why I kept it so long, and what the librarian said when I handed it over.
There's a shelf at my local indie where people abandon half-read paperbacks with handwritten notes tucked inside, and I've become a silent correspondent with people I'll never meet. Here's why a stranger's scrawled 'wait for it' in the margins beats any algorithm.
I never expected much from my site's analytics dashboard, but buried in the data was something that stopped me cold: a handful of anonymous visitors who return again and again, leaving nothing behind. This is what I learned about loyalty, attention, and the quiet relationships we build with people we'll never meet.
I found a thank-you letter I wrote at ten years old, all wobbly cursive and misspelled sincerity, and it made me wonder when I stopped meaning it out loud. So I tried sending one handwritten note a week for a month. Here's what happened to my friendships, my handwriting, and my ability to sit still.
I haven't read my comment section in two years, but I've never once considered closing it. Here's my theory about why artists keep the door unlocked for people they hope never knock.
The day my hobby started paying rent, I nearly stopped enjoying it altogether. This is what happened when my sketchbook learned the word 'invoice' — and how I clawed back the joy.
Every so often, a stranger finds something I wrote at 2 a.m. and sends back a piece of their own life. Here's what those small, anonymous messages have taught me about courage, honesty, and why the people who know us least sometimes read us best.
I found a shoebox of my grandmother's letters from the 1970s while clearing out my mom's garage in Ohio, and I haven't been able to shut up about it since. Not because of what she wrote about — because of how. This is what fifty-year-old ink taught me about voice that no writing program ever did.
Somewhere in my analytics is a person who has read every essay I've published and never once said hello. This is my attempt to thank them — and to make peace with the fact that most attention will always be invisible.
I made a zine, printed forty of them, and sold exactly three — two of which went to people who have known me since middle school. Here's why I'd do it again tomorrow, and what the whole gloriously unprofitable ordeal taught me about making things anyway.
For one month, I drew commuters at my neighborhood bus stop — fast, imperfect, slightly terrifying portraits. What I learned about my city, my attention span, and the strange intimacy of being caught looking.
Somewhere along the way, artists got convinced that sounding confusing equals sounding deep. Here's a field guide to spotting the jargon — and writing a statement that sounds like you, not a thesaurus with a gallery show.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped finishing things on purpose—and discovered that an open loop is its own kind of honesty. This is a defense of the half-told story, the abandoned ending, and the beauty of leaving a little room for the reader to wander.
Forty hours on regional buses through towns you'd never Google taught me more about character than any workshop. Five lessons in the craft of watching—each one earned the hard way, somewhere between here and nowhere in particular.
There are 214 files in my drafts folder, and I've decided they're not failures — they're the most honest self-portrait I own. A case for treating unfinished writing as a living archive instead of a shame closet.
Somewhere between the productivity gurus and the step-counting apps, we forgot that walking used to be a creative act, not a metric. Here's how aimless wandering saved my writing—and why your best idea is probably three blocks from where you're standing.