On creation, presence, and not performing
This idea came to me while weaving for the first time. It was a school assignment, which meant it would be graded, which normally means I would be strategizing, polishing, performing. I’m obsessed with image and coherence, with finishing things until they behave, until they know how to sit properly in the world. And yet, for once, I allowed myself to slip. To do something unresolved. To make something a little ugly. Strange how unsettling that felt. But at the same time, so freeing.
The piece is all black, built from different textures in a plain weave, interrupted by a few sprinkles of pistachio-green glossy embroidery thread. They aren’t neatly placed, not intentional in the way that earns approval. They’re just there. Nothing clever. Nothing impressive. Probably not an A+. But my heart was allowed to breathe.
For the first time in a while, I stopped trying to achieve a look. That phrase has always unsettled me, because it’s never just about aesthetics. It carries an undercurrent of escape, a desire to be somewhere else, someone else. Please, just anywhere but here. Anyone but me. This time, I stayed, and staying was hard. As I worked, things I hadn’t made space for began to surface. Tension I’d been holding together with taste and control loosened. There was no concept to hide behind, no justification to rehearse, just my hands, the material, and the discomfort of not performing refinement but practicing it.
As all creatives eventually learn, whatever you make is a manifestation of you. Not metaphorically. Literally. Your work speaks your mind, your soul, your dreams, your fear. And it’s kind of fucked up how the environment teaches people to fear and resent their own self-portrait, to distrust what comes out when they’re being honest. I have moments like that too, where I try to make my work resemble me less. Anything to soften it, to make it less revealing, more digestible, something people can consume easily and live with comfortably. Diluting the self starts to feel like responsibility. Learn the rules before you break them. Make sense first, then become yourself. In this world, that logic holds.
But at some point, I found myself in a different world. Mine. And there, the idea sounds deranged. What a strange way to think. If you’ve reached that level of exasperation, congratulations. That’s the beginning. That’s where you start molding yourself from here, not into something else, but into the only version that exists. Refining the one and only you. The you that isn’t encouraged to show up, that hesitates before saying hi, that feels like a liability in polite spaces.
This is where the work becomes staying. Learning to sit in the void of yourself and speak into it, instead of scrambling for references, scrolling endlessly, outsourcing your center of gravity. It’s hard. It always feels unbearable right before it becomes inevitable. There’s a moment where you know, deeply, that it has to be done. You can’t betray that voice forever without paying for it somewhere else.
At first, the things you make when you stop diluting yourself can look messy. They can even disgust you. They feel like a bug in the system, something that exposes too much and refuses to behave. But if you keep going, if you don’t abandon that place out of panic or shame, it becomes home. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s yours. And once you live there long enough, refinement stops being a mask; it becomes care.