I am sitting here drinking my first cup of coffee (before I have a glass of water), I am wondering how I got to this point, how I became an artist who stopped making work. I think it is connected to the fact that, for a long time, I was a person who was afraid to exist out in the world. I went to work and came home as quickly as possible.

Two years ago that changed. I met my wife. I still go out and come home as quickly as possible, but now it is with someone that I love and trust. Love opens you up in a way that nothing else does.

For the first time in a while, I am able to breathe for a little bit, and that breathing has reopened my artistic practice. My life in Thailand allows me to make things again. I’m working on my first large canvas in years. I’m working with paint and natural dyes and fabric and thread. I am excited to get my hands dirty again. I am excited to experiment with new mediums and revisit the ones I rushed past during school in the hurry of getting a degree (learning like that shouldn’t be rushed, but that’s a different post).

There have been a lot of excuses in my life, some of them valid, some of them not so much, and many of them inflated by intense anxiety.

For a long time, numbness felt easier. Easier than being afraid. Easier than being vulnerable. Easier than being present.

I am no longer willing to be numb. My life is too good, and I have too much that I want to remember.

So the anxiety is worth it.

It is still debilitating at times, but it is worth it.

(Hospitals and airplanes, though. Am I right?)

So I am starting to make things again. I am relearning to trust the process and to do things when I’m scared. Spending my life paralyzed is not an option, and now that my new life feels like my real life, I can start to draw from that as well.

The changes of the past two years have been radical, and adjusting has not been the easiest. It has been wonderful, but all change is hard.

I am also redrawing boundaries, as I used to be willing to share a lot more of myself than I am now. My world is me and my wife, and the amount of sharing, outside of a few close friends and my sister, that I’m willing to do is really limited.

I did not realize that being married would change me in that way. Some things are so sacred and healing that they belong to us, and I am not capable of giving them to the world.

Not everything needs an audience.

Maybe someday, when we are both old and give even fewer f***ks than we do now, some of that will be shared. For now, that is for us, and our definition of “that” will change.

Overall, I want to write about process, and I am not naïve enough to think people will read about process without story. I’m hoping to slow myself down. This is the longest thing I’ve written in quite a while, which feels embarrassing because it’s only five hundred and seventy-two words long. I’ve written novellas, so I also need to get my focus back because I’d like to finish writing a book.

I digress (as if this was anything other than digression).

I want to write about process because process interests me so much more than the final outcome, so much so that I never want to finish anything because then it becomes boring to me.

If something interests me, I will drag it out forever.

Perhaps that’s part of the process too.