A Way of Seeing

Over the last year and a half, I haven't shared much.

At first, I thought I had stepped away from my work. Looking back, that's not quite true. I was still creating, just in ways that weren't particularly visible.

Part of it was the news. I've always felt things deeply, and there were stretches where I couldn't open my phone without the news taking root in me for the rest of the day. Making things beautiful started to feel like the wrong instinct to have, when so much felt like it was falling apart. Another part of it was wrapping up projects that, while successful, left me feeling unfulfilled. The work I admired felt so clear and confident. My own work felt scattered by comparison.

Around the same time, I was pouring my energy into Flower Heads. It needed my attention and deserved it. Last year, I participated in my first market of the year and spent the weekend standing behind my booth filled with things I had designed and brought into the world myself. What surprised me wasn't whether people bought them. It was realizing how proud I was of what I had made, and how I had presented it. Others noticed it too. From the display, to the custom lamp covers I made, to the rug and flowers. The magic was that it simply felt like me.

That realization stayed with me.

For years, I thought I needed to choose a lane. Was I a designer? An illustrator? A photographer?

The truth is, I was never that interested in choosing. The work that excited me always lived in between things, not inside one category. How did the person who loved branding also love styling interiors? How did the same person end up equally fascinated by museum archives, flowers, old hotels, travel, illustration, and books?

My friend Taylor de la Fuentes of Bigmouth Copy often asks her copywriting clients: what is your secret sauce? After that market, I finally had an answer. Not a skill or a discipline. Not branding, or photography, or illustration.

It was discernment. Not the ability to choose, but the ability to recognize what resonates.

A detail on a fireplace mantel that echoes something I noticed in a museum. A book that changes the way I look at a room. A flower, a photograph, an object, a city, a sketch, each revealing a connection to something larger.

If there is a common thread running through my work, it's not what I'm looking at, but how I look at it. A practice of paying attention. Finding meaning beneath the surface and shaping those discoveries into stories, photographs, illustrations, and experiences that invite others to look a little closer.

Looking back, that thread was present in everything I was making. I just didn't have a name for it yet.

Eventually, I began calling it visual poetry.

I'll share more about that in the next post, but discovering it felt less like inventing something new and more like finding a name for something that had been quietly guiding my work all along.

The time I spent away from sharing wasn't a failure. It wasn't giving up. It wasn't even a pause in the way I once thought. It was time spent listening. Reading. Traveling. Making. Sketching. Collecting. Paying attention to what kept returning and letting go of what didn't.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking what I should be making and started paying attention to what I couldn't stop noticing.

That shift changed everything.

So when it came time to return to my work, I didn't feel like I was starting over. I wasn't staring at a blank page. I wasn't trying to reinvent myself.

Instead, I found myself asking a much simpler question:

Where did I leave off?