Gathering Season
from The Art of NOT Overcomplicating It
“The internet rewards consistency. Real creative lives are usually much more cyclical than that.
There are seasons for output. Seasons for rebuilding. Seasons for uncertainty. Seasons where your identity changes faster than your career does. Learning how to stay connected to yourself across all of them matters.”
I think about the season I was in when I started this Substack. I was fresh out of surgery in 2022, bored and angry out of my mind. All I had energy for was lying on my bed with my computer, so I figured I might as well type. Write out all my frustrations, my story, my heartbreaks, my wins. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The words just poured out of me like a broken faucet that would no longer be contained. Everything else in my life was on pause, so life became about healing, resting, and slowly rebuilding… and all I could do was write.
Thankfully, I’m not in that season anymore, though it does mean other things take up more of my time, and now, when the words flow, I’m usually driving and I have to whip out my recording app so I don’t lose them in the wind. In this season, I have an able body. And I use her to the fullest extent.
This season, I have been living. Collecting moments, bruises, bee stings, sunburns, and love. I’ve been working on big projects, planning my wedding, traveling a lot, moving my body outside, soaking up the ocean, watching a lot of soccer, spending so much time with family— in my cities, at the lake, on the opposite side of the country. All this go, go, go takes an inevitable toll on me. I can’t devote as much time to journaling, drafting and musing. I’m tired. All. The. Time. I get sick from the stress of it all, even when everything is mostly good.
Today I had lunch with a dear friend, Brandon. I once described him as an ear because he’s incredible at listening. This time, he reminds me that some seasons are for gathering… collecting… and that it’s okay for me to be quiet as I do so. It might actually be better to process and then share what I’ve learned rather than doing it in real time.
This is honey to my heart because just the other day, when it was past midnight and I couldn’t sleep, I journaled about the tight feeling in my chest. I called her “I’m not doing enough,” and I let her convince me for a brief moment that she was right and that the next rational move was to add more things to my already maxed-out to-do list. But this is not the answer.
I fear this is what multidisciplinary artists struggle with most: making peace with not pursuing every interest at the same time. We feel guilt and shame for falling behind—maybe some of us—for not monetizing every skill and talent, for not showing up enough publicly, for wanting to share our lives authentically and simultaneously being terrified of being seen.
A full life already exists for me outside of the internet, and I struggle to show up authentically in both at the same time. I’m already exhausted from all the moving around and all the things on my plate, and just because not all of these things lead to money or visibility or success immediately does not mean they are not worthy of pursuing. Just because these things are evolving quietly behind my studio door, or slowly in my heart, or existing only in my camera roll, it does not mean they are not concrete, or tangible, or valuable. Documenting publicly doesn’t make life any more real. Maybe I have to say it out loud and write it on paper a hundred times until I believe it. Maybe acceptance of this is really all we need.
So much life is being lived right now I can’t possibly document it all. And this is where half of the magic happens. This is where I grow and expand beyond what I knew I was capable of. I remind myself: this rushing momentum will not last forever; this current to-do list will soon be replaced by less urgent and monumental things. Soon I won’t be planning a wedding, and the beach will not be for swimming because winter will have settled in. In these seasons, there may be more space for words, more time for musing and journaling and counting the bounty of my reaping. This is where I come back to myself. In the calm, in the still, in the slower moments that ebb and leave room for doing nothing.
I worry I sound like a broken record, but this is the reality of learning how to be a human in real time. The same cuts will keep opening until I learn how to properly heal them. I run with open wounds until I find myself at a rest stop. I suture myself together, dust myself off, and dress in my favorite outfit—onward. This is life, a series of events and lessons and gains and losses, and we collect them all like seashells on the beach and eventually call them memories.
So that’s what I’ve been up to. Adding to my growing seashell collection of memories, some more painful and sharp than others, some sweet and soft and slow like the sun showers I see every other day from my studio window. I trust the signs and I trust their timing. I open my hands wide and then open them up a little wider still. I pray for more life to live, and I keep my hands open, ready to catch it all as it comes.
Thank you for being here. I’ve recently realized that paywalling posts has taken a lot of the joy out of writing for me. I get stuck in this anxious loop of deciding which pieces are “worthy” of being paid for and which aren’t. And then there’s accessibility, which matters deeply to me. I want what I’ve learned, and the art that’s come from it, to feel attainable.
So moving forward, I won’t be paywalling posts anymore. That said, I do believe this work is valuable and worthy of support. Supporting this space allows me to keep exploring what it means to be an artist—not just in one medium, but in all the ways they overlap, intertwine, and come to life.
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with love,
I believe the KISS acronym is particularly apt.