Not Pretty Yet
I got back Sunday night from four days with a room full of women who all run their own creative businesses, and I haven't stopped thinking since. Something about being around people building things — actually building them, messily, in real time — did something I didn't know I needed. I came home lit up in a way I haven't felt in a long time. Maybe longer than I want to admit.
It's a strange kind of energy to have right now, because there's nowhere yet to point it. The studio's still about two weeks out. We're still unpacking boxes in the rental, still figuring out which drawer the scissors ended up in. There's no easel up. There's no finished thing to show for any of this.
What I have are doodles. Small ones, done at the kitchen table or out on the porch, wherever there's five free minutes and something flat to lean on. No series forming behind them, no plan, but I'm having more fun with a marker than I have in a long time. There's no pressure on a doodle. Nobody's waiting on it. It gets to exist for a minute, and then I put it down and go find whatever my husband needs help locating in a box.
I don't have any pretty pictures to show you this week. I mean that literally, not as false modesty. Everything's still mostly in boxes. What I have instead is a hot, humid version of summer I'm actually trying to be inside of instead of just get through: walking by the river some evenings, beach time when the tide cooperates, the kind of Lowcountry heat that makes you slow down whether you planned to or not.
It's an odd combination, quite honestly — feeling this fired up about the next year of the business while having nowhere yet to put that energy to work. I keep wanting to rush past the in-between part, to skip straight to the version of me back at the easel with a plan already in hand. But the mastermind reminded me of something I'd let myself forget: the bigger, harder work — the kind that actually changes a business — usually asks you to sit in exactly this kind of uncomfortable pause first. Not produce your way out of it.
So I'm trying to let this be what it is. Doodles instead of paintings. Boxes instead of a studio. A summer I'm actually present for instead of one I'm rushing past to get to whatever's next. I don't know yet what the bigger projects I'm imagining actually look like in practice. I have appetite, not a plan, but for the first time in a while, I'm excited to find out instead of anxious about it.
If the July print hasn't shown up in your mailbox yet — the heron, working title Mid-Flight — it ships this week, so keep an eye on your mailbox.
Two weeks until the studio. I'll take the doodles until then.
— Shelby
