The canvas.

On making and sharing, offline and on.

For two years, a 40” x 58” canvas had been sitting in our living room, wrapped up in brown paper.

For two years, this canvas—a “large” at Happy Medium, where I painted it in April 2024—has been a physical manifestation of my burnout. (…Why did I get a large canvas? I’ll never know.) I hated what I painted and left it in the living room—too big to store properly—knowing I could easily paint over it, but feeling physically and mentally unable to do so.

So much has been written about creativity being a muscle you have to exercise that it feels silly for me to explore the concept in writing. But it is, and while, in 2023, I managed to write 3,000+ word weekly recaps of season 2 of AJLT (I couldn’t help but wonder, how did I do that?) which sustained me for a bit, for a good bit of 2024 and 2025, I stopped exercising it. Instead, I poured (dripped?) what little creativity I could muster into my desk job, and then into planning our wedding. But without intentionally making space for that outlet outside of work, my creativity blocked.

I spent 2025 planning our wedding and white-knuckling through what was once my dream job. When I wasn’t crying in the shower, I spent every video call with this wrapped-up canvas in the background behind me, blurred out, but still there, bifurcating our living room and taunting me.

Obviously the nails were the point of this photo but you can see it in the background, blurred out just like it was on my Teams calls

There was a moment during our wedding reception when I was overcome by a specific emotion that’s hard to name—not just happiness, but also sadness for my future self, because as happy as I was in that moment, I knew I would be equally as miserable when I returned to work. (If there’s not a German word for that emotion, there should be.)

Luckily, three weeks later, I no longer had to be there.

I got a new job, but my entire routine was thrown into upheaval—after nearly six years of working remotely, I was back in an office 3 days a week. It was a job in a new beauty category that I had to learn the ins and outs of. It was a long, very cold and snowy winter here in New York. The creative block persisted.

Turns out, I don’t handle change well. (I’m a Virgo! and an eldest daughter! I’m a nightmare!). But in the months since I started this new job, I’ve been working to better manage how I react to changes that are outside of my control and really understand (not just intellectually) that vulnerability isn’t a liability.

Because that creative block? I can’t just blame it on my former, stressful job. I’ve been struggling with what to share, how much to share, making art visibly, wondering why anyone cares what I have to say when every writer has a Substack these days. It’s also the year of our lord 2026, and I’ve spent more than 25 years of my one wild and precious life online. I was the 12-year-old making *NSYNC fan pages on Geocities. I had a secret Livejournal where I poured my 15-year-old heart out and made Internet friends, some of whom I’m still in touch with today. I was thrilled when Facebook became cool in 2005, thinking perhaps I didn’t have to hide my early-adoption Internet-obsessed self from my classmates. I spent college football games glued to Twitter in the 2010s, following hilarious sports writers and spitting out lukewarm takes of my own.

For the past few years, I’ve been tired of sharing. I’m tired of the seemingly shallow connection that the Internet has tricked us into thinking is real.

The Internet made easy connection even easier and deeper connection that much harder—because if we can all just connect online, why bother making the effort to do it elsewhere? I don’t want send condolences or congratulations via an Instagram comment or DM! I want to send physical, handwritten cards—but more often than not, I settle for an Uber Eats gift card (my default for new parents, people who lose a family member, or extended hospital stays).

The other issue? My intense fear of being wrong. Can one “do” art wrong, you might ask? No! Hence why “make bad art” is my motto of the year. All signs point to “just do it,” and any successful artist will tell you—bad art, or bad writing, is just part of the process. Unfortunately, for the past few years, I’ve been content to turn my brain off to deal with the realities of the world, and zone out to television, which hasn’t been conducive to exercising that creative muscle.

But the ability to create—not just consume—is essential in this late-stage capitalist hellscape we’re in. I don’t want AI to take over our critical thinking abilities, and so we turn to art, and sharing it online because we need connection and community, and when done intentionally, I suppose it can be done online.

I always joke that “I’m really fun at parties” (I’m obviously not, I’m basically the Debbie Downer of group situations and a large networking event is hell on earth for me.) But really, I want to make deeper connections. I want to hear someone get really excited about their hyper-fixation and tell me why I should care about it, too. I want to empathize with someone else’s childhood trauma and discuss it in a healthy, reflective way. I want to compare travel notes and experiences. And I don’t always want to do that online. Particularly the childhood trauma part. (Stay tuned for more on my hyper-fixation, though.) I’ve spent the last few months listening to CDs, rereading childhood and teenage favorite books, and that’s helped me return to my self a little. Just like I set aside time to the gym three times a week, I also need to dedicate time to creating and playing. (We all do, really.)

Back to that canvas.

I think I was originally going for how a concert feels, but I do not know enough about colors and light to know how to capture that

Three months ago, I finally bought a set of acrylic paints. Three weeks ago, I finally unwrapped it from its brown paper sheath, popped in a Sade CD, and painted over it. (Predictably, I used up nearly all of the hot pink and purple paint I had bought.) The canvas is still sitting, propped up, in the living room, but this time it’s not covered in brown paper, and when a friend came to visit recently, she exclaimed how much she loved it, not knowing it was a creative scratch pad of sorts. Instead of taunting me as a constant reminder of my burnout, it’s now a reminder that making art, bad or otherwise, shouldn’t be such an arduous task.

This entire missive probably qualifies as bad art. Oh well! Life’s a journey!