My Actual New Year
There's a box in the new studio corner I still haven't fully unpacked, and today I finally got to the bottom of it. Under a roll of canvas I found a tube of paint I bought probably six years ago, half-used, label practically gone — and right next to it, my daughter's school supply list, still creased from where I folded it in the car. Two completely different timelines, sitting in the same box, like they'd been waiting to have this conversation without me.
I map my actual year to the school calendar more than I ever do to January 1st. Always have. New Year's resolutions arrive in the dead cold of winter when nothing in me wants to start anything. September asks something different of me — there's a bell schedule again, there's a reason to buy new pencils, there's a version of a "fresh start" that doesn't require pretending I feel like a different person overnight. I just feel like myself, with slightly more structure than I had in June.
That's the part of unpacking I didn't expect: it's not just moving boxes into a new room, it's running into thoughts I put down mid-sentence months ago and now have to decide what to do with. A half-finished color note. A page of measurements for a piece I never started. The energy I had when I wrote those things isn't the energy I have now — I can tease out some of what I meant, but it's a little like reading your own handwriting from a different mood. The context has to be reconstructed. It doesn't just come back.
So there's a real question underneath all this unpacking: do I pick the old thought back up where I left it, or do I let the new energy overwrite it entirely? Quite honestly, most days I want both. I want the continuity of finishing what I started, and I also want the jolt of whatever's actually pulling at me right now, unrelated to any of it. Marrying those two energies is turning out to be its own kind of work — not the fun kind, exactly, but the kind that feels like it's actually building something instead of just producing something.
After a summer that ran on very little structure — beach days, no real schedule, everyone a little feral by August — I didn't expect to be this relieved to have some back. There's a specific kind of creative fuel that only shows up once a container exists to put it in. Loose time is nice for about three weeks and then it starts to feel like static. A closing time for the studio, a pickup line to be at, an actual bell schedule somewhere in town — all of it is giving the ideas something to push against, and they're pushing harder than they were in July.
I don't know yet which of the half-finished thoughts in these boxes are worth reopening and which ones were only ever right for the person who wrote them down. I'm going to find out the slow way, one box at a time.
If you want the version of this that's even less resolved than the blog — an actual page, unearthed rather than painted fresh — that's closer to what shows up in Studies from the Studio this month.
Back next week with whichever box I get to next.
— Shelby
