Wavy on Purpose
I sat down this week to start something new, and I didn't know where it was going. Not in the falsely humble way people say that — I mean I actually didn't know. The first lines went down wavy, a lay-in that looked more like a question than a decision, and I went over a couple of them twice because my hand didn't trust its own first pass yet. None of it looks like anything yet. That's the whole point of this stage, and for once I'm trying to actually sit inside it instead of rushing toward the part that looks finished. The wavy line is where the interest is — the mark where I clearly messed up and kept going anyway, not the version where I went back and smoothed it into something tidier.
It's the same thing I feel listening to a live band, with a live singer, no autotune. The note that cracks a little. The breath you can hear before the next line. Run it through a machine afterward and it can still sound good , but it isn't the same as hearing someone actually reach for a note and almost miss. I don't think that's a small thing to notice, either. It's the whole reason I keep choosing the version with the raw edges over the version with none.
I left home at eighteen looking for grit. I wanted things that were true and hard-won, not tidy. I wasn't especially interested in easy. Two decades later, I came back. Not because home had gotten easy, but because I'd noticed the rest of the world was busy smoothing all the grit and character out of everyday life — perfect lawns, matching mailboxes. I wanted the marshes and skinned knees for my daughter instead: hours of exploring and playing without someone hovering the whole time. The kind of places you only find by wandering, half by accident.
A life with no mess in it is usually a life where nobody took a chance. No wrong turns, no unplanned detours worth telling anyone about later. I want the grit. I want the intrigue. I want good stories. Quite honestly, a spotless life sounds boring to me, and I think it does to most people too, once they stop performing otherwise.
So that's what this new work is doing right now. It's going down wrong on purpose, resisting getting corrected in front of whoever happens to be watching, refusing to arrive already solved. If you follow along on Instagram, you'll probably see a piece of it before I know what it actually is myself.
There's a longer version of this thought rattling around too — about everything getting smoothed toward perfect right now, and what that actually costs us. That one felt more like a Substack conversation than a studio update. I'll put it up over there this week, if you want the fuller argument.
This month's Studies from the Studio print ships the 30th, and it's a study, not a finished thought, which feels like the right kind of thing to send out into the world the same week I'm starting something wavy and unresolved, on purpose, at the table.
I don't know yet what to call this one, or what it's going to turn into. I'll tell you when I do.
— Shelby
