So why don’t I watch TV if I work in the business? First of all, because everything I watch, I have to watch twice. The first time, I am just critiquing it. The second time, if it has a good storyline, I can actually enjoy it. I am constantly picking things apart. The sets. The paint. The choices. The details. The things no normal person should care about, but that my brain absolutely will not let go of.

The other reason is that I have so many creative ideas and things I want to do that I usually make those the priority. But lately, I have been wanting actually to sit down and relax, so I have been trying to watch more TV. A few nights ago, I watched The Glass Castle. I thought it was fine. I read the book a long time ago, and I do not remember it being the same. But I think that is often true when you read the book first and then see the movie. You are usually disappointed. So I have a tendency to watch the movie first and then read the book if the movie is interesting enough.

But most of the time when I watch TV, I watch kids’ movies. I think I have seen Moana fifty times. I do not like the newer one as much as the original, but what I love about kids’ movies is that they reduce life to its simplest, most basic understanding. They do not complicate things the way we do as adults. Kids’ movies simplify. They name things plainly. They show you the truth in a way your adult brain might otherwise try to outsmart.

Recently, somebody suggested I watch Encanto, and I seriously felt personally attacked by this movie. Not in a bad way. More in the way that it made me look at things differently. And I think that is what good stories do. They show you something about yourself before you even realize you are looking.

I did not just relate to one character, which is what we usually do. I related to basically all of them. All of them felt like a part of who I am, and I think that might be true for a lot of us. Maybe we do not carry every character in the exact same way, but we carry pieces of these roles. The strong one. The perfect one. The truth-teller. The quiet one. The caretaker. The emotional one. The one who does not know where they fit.

I was Mirabel, the one without the obvious gift, trying to prove that she belonged in a family system where you had to prove your worth by being useful. She could see what was breaking before anyone else wanted to admit there were any cracks, and she was trying to hold everyone together while really wondering, what about me? Where do I fit?

I was Luisa, carrying everything because I could. The strong one. The dependable one. The one who could lift donkeys and buildings, tend to family emergencies and all the emotional labor and impossible expectations. The one who looked fine because she was functional, but underneath, she was like a pressure pot building.

Then there is Isabela, trapped inside the performance of being beautiful, graceful, good, and easy to love. The golden child inside her own cage. I call it the “dance, monkey, dance” role. When you are expected to perform on command the way everybody else wants you to. But it is really when she makes something prickly and real that she becomes more alive. For her, it was a cactus. An honest cactus. The first time she made something that was hers.

And then there was Bruno, exiled for telling the truth. He saw what no one else wanted to see. He carried the burden of perception. He became the scapegoat because the system could not tolerate the information he shared. So the family made a rule: we don’t talk about Bruno. Which essentially meant Bruno could not talk for Bruno.

Sometimes I think every family has a Bruno. The person who names the dysfunction. Or maybe it is the person who remembers what everyone else rewrote. Sometimes it is the person who carries the grief, the pattern, or the uncomfortable truth. They saw him as dangerous, but he was not. He was just inconvenient.

Then there was Dolores, hearing everything and saying almost nothing. Hyperaware. Tuned in. Listening through walls. Catching shifts in tone. Noticing what was not said in order to understand what was being said. People like Dolores are often mistaken for quiet, but they are actually overloaded. She knew too much because she heard too much.

Then there was Pepa, trying to control the weather of her emotions because everyone else was affected by them. Her gift was her trap. She was not allowed to simply feel. Her feelings became the climate. Her anxiety, the clouds. Her fear, the storms. And everyone around her seemed to need her to calm down, not because she was unsafe, but because her emotions made the room uncomfortable.

I think that one hit the most. Because some of us learned very early that our feelings were too much. Too visible. Too inconvenient. So we tried to regulate not just ourselves, but everyone else’s reaction to us. And somewhere in that reaction, we lost orientation to who we were.

I was Julieta, healing everyone with what she made. The caretaker. The nourisher. The one whose labor becomes medicine. There is something beautiful in that, but also something exhausting. When your gift is healing, people can forget you are a person who also needs care. They come to you hungry, wounded, needing something. And because you can give it, you do. Again and again and again. Until you are utterly depleted and shrunken in your own existence.

And then there is Abuela. The one who built the house. The one who survived the original trauma. The one who lost so much that she became devoted to never losing anything again. Her control did not come from nowhere. Her hardness was built around grief. Her fear became family law. Her pain became a system everyone else had to live inside.

Just hear that sentence for a moment. “Her pain became a system everyone else had to live inside.” How many of us know what this is like? When we have to tiptoe around another to stay close, even when it feels uncomfortable.

That is what generational trauma does. It starts as survival, then becomes structure. It starts as protection, then becomes pressure. It starts as, “I never want us to suffer again,” and somehow turns into, “You must become perfect so I can feel safe.”

The origin of trauma bleeds into later friendships, relationships, and truly, it becomes the whole lens of how we view and interact with the world around us.

That is why Encanto works so well. The magic is not really the point. The house is the nervous system. The candle is the family story. The cracks are the truth trying to get in. The gifts are the roles everyone had to play to keep the whole thing standing. And Mirabel, the one without a gift, becomes the one who can see the system clearly.

That feels important. Sometimes the person who does not fit the family structure is not broken. Sometimes they are the doorway out of it. Or a window into it. Sometimes, the one who cannot perform the assigned role is the one who reveals the cost of everyone else’s performance. Sometimes not having a “gift” is what allows you to see the people underneath theirs.

I think that is why I cried. Because kids’ movies always make me cry, I swear. But also because I feel like we all have parts of ourselves that learned to adapt in order to move through the world. Maybe we do not hold all the characters that Encanto has. Maybe we just have slivers of them around different people. But it is the fact that it is being named, I think, and the ability to visually watch it play out in front of you. It becomes interesting and sort of like its own excavation.

Maybe you have been the strong one. The shapeshifter. The truth-teller. The sensor. The caretaker. The emotional weather system. The one trying to be perfect. The one exiled for naming things. The one wondering why you did not get the same kind of magic everyone else seemed to have.

And maybe you have also been the house. Cracking quietly while everyone kept asking it to hold.

What Encanto understands is that healing does not happen because everyone finally performs better. Healing happens when the performance stops. When Luisa gets to be tired. When Isabela gets to be messy. When Bruno gets to come home. When Mirabel gets to be seen. When Abuela finally tells the truth about what happened to her. When the family stops worshiping the miracle and starts seeing the people carrying it.

Maybe that is what coming home really is. Not returning to a perfect place. Not fixing the house so it never cracks again. Not becoming the version of yourself that everyone else can understand, praise, or use.

Maybe coming home is when all the parts of you that had to leave in order to survive are finally allowed back in. The strong one. The scared one. The beautiful one. The angry one. The quiet one. The truth-teller. The caretaker. The one who performed. The one who disappeared. The one who kept holding the whole house up while wondering if anyone could see her shaking.

The person becomes whole when all the parts of who they are get to come home and live inside the house.

The house of self.

That is what home means to me now. It is not one place. It is not one person. It is not a house that never breaks. It is the ability to stay close to yourself, even when everything around you shifts.

That is why I can go wherever I want in this world and still not be far from who I am.

Because the real miracle was never the house.

It was learning how to come home to myself.

It just so happens home looks like Skewed North — a little off center and a little on point.

Off course. On purpose.

That would be the mantra of my life right now.

I don’t know about you, but I have been dealing with a lot of upheaval in ways I didn’t ask for. I have been trying to accept what shows up without immediately wrestling it to the ground like I am an MMA fighter, which is very easy to write about and much harder to practice.

Do you ever feel like every time you turn around, there is something else to handle? Another problem to solve? Another version of your life asking to be adjusted?

For almost a year, I have been in physical and occupational therapy for a work injury that has left me unable to paint the way I used to. My whole career is shifting, and since I appear to be the only official member of the “No Painter Left Behind Act of 2026,” I have decided to stop resisting the truth of what is showing up.

I have to shift.

Maybe I have to pivot.

Maybe I have to let the work change shape before I know exactly what that means.

The real truth is that I don’t know if I will ever paint the way I used to again. Even typing that hurts.

I just got my studio set up. I have been making plans around painting again. I have been trying to insert the positive mindset here. But the reality is more complicated than that. I may need more time. I may need surgery. I may need to stop pretending the old version of my creative life is waiting patiently for me to return to it unchanged.

Oi.

That breaks my heart a little.

Because painting has never just been work for me. It has been how I regulate myself. It has been meditation. It has been survival. It has been the place I go when the world is too loud.

Shift, shift, pivot, pivot.

So this week I sat down and took stock of what I actually have in front of me: the script, the memoir, the painting issues, the assemblages, the five other books I have been slowly working on for years, and the two-terabyte drive filled with photographs from all over the world.

And I decided something.

I don’t need more projects.

I need a clearer center.

So for this season, that center is my memoir and this Substack.

The work I’m building is about finding your way after life knocks you off course. The one thing I feel like I can truly speak about with authority.

It’s about grief, art, survival, memory, love, reinvention, and the strange, stubborn process of becoming yourself again.

And again.

Some of it will become a book. Some of it will live here. Some of it will come through images, studio notes, fragments, and essays. But it all belongs to the same world.

Going forward, I’ll be publishing one essay every Friday.

These pieces may be memoir scenes, reflections, visual notes, companion essays, or fragments from the larger story I’m shaping.

This space is becoming the workshop for the book.

The memoir is the shaped body of work.

Substack is where I let you see it being built.

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Something more polished. More shaped. More “I sat down with coffee and thought deeply about the meaning of things. Again.”

Instead, this week looked like my mother having brain surgery, me trying to stay present for the unknowns around that, and also trying to finish up my paint studio — which, like most things involving paint, dust, boxes, decisions, and emotional attachment, took more out of me than I expected.

So this is not the essay I planned.

It is the essay I actually have.

And maybe that matters more.

There are weeks where life gives you a clean house, a quiet room, and enough emotional bandwidth to make art about what happened.

And then there are weeks where you are inside the happening.

You are answering calls. Carrying things. Waiting for updates. Moving your body through errands and rooms and hospital thoughts. Looking at your unfinished studio and thinking, somehow, this also has to become a place where I can begin again.

That has been this week.

My mother’s surgery has pulled me into the kind of attention that does not announce itself as work, but absolutely is work.

The watching. The listening. The translating of medical language. The trying to understand what is being said, what is not being said, and what needs to be asked next.

In some ways, this has been going on since August 2025. Since then, I have been to more doctors with “neuro” in front of their titles than I can count.

But really, it has been going on since August of 2012, when my mother suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Caregiving has a way of bending time. A day can disappear into one phone call, one appointment, one decision, one worry you keep setting down and picking back up again.

And now, fourteen years later, she is finally having brain surgery.

To say I feel relieved is an understatement.

Relieved because there is finally a procedure, a plan, a possible shift.

Relieved because hope, even when it arrives late, is still hope.

And I am tired.

No, that is not the truth.

I am exhausted.

I am hoping this surgery gives her relief. I am hoping it gives me some too. Maybe not forever. Maybe not for the rest of her life. But maybe for the next ten years.

Maybe enough time to stop living in constant response.

Maybe enough time to breathe.

I’m sharing a little more from the middle of it: the studio, the work injury, the strange act of preparing for a creative life I can’t fully return to yet, and what I am doing to keep from disappearing while I wait (for paid subscribers).

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For a long time, I have carried the quiet suspicion that I am doing my life wrong.

Too many ideas.
Too many directions.
Too many half-built worlds calling my name at the same time.

A memoir. A script. A collection of paintings at my studio. A photograph I want to turn into something else. A story that wants to become an essay, or maybe a series of books. A business that is still becoming itself. A room I want to redesign. An archive I want to organize. A body of work I know exists, even when I cannot yet see exactly how all the pieces belong together.

Everywhere I look, the world seems to be handing me the same advice:

Pick one thing.
Focus.
Finish.
Stop getting distracted.

Which is excellent advice when the distraction is scrolling Youtube for three hours or deciding that reorganizing a drawer is suddenly an urgent spiritual priority.

Not that I would know anything about that.

But what if the other projects are not distractions? What if they are part of the way I work?

What if the problem is not that I have too many creative lives moving through me at once?

What if the problem is that I keep expecting myself to behave like a person who only has one?

The Lie of the One Perfect Thing

I recently listened to a talk about an idea called slow-motion multitasking.

Not the frantic kind of multitasking where you are trying to answer an email, make dinner, respond to a text, and pretend you are listening to someone at the same time.

That is not creativity.

That is a nervous system screaming into a paper bag.

Slow-motion multitasking is different.

It is the practice of allowing several meaningful projects to exist at the same time and moving between them over a longer stretch of time. Not because you are incapable of committing, but because sometimes one project opens a door in another.

Sometimes a painting explains a paragraph.

Sometimes a photograph becomes the missing piece of a story.

Sometimes working on the business makes you understand the art.

Sometimes stepping away from the memoir is the only thing that lets you come back and actually see it.

This idea landed somewhere deep in me because I have spent years believing the proof of my seriousness would be my ability to cut away every other interest and force myself down one narrow road. Jolene, pick a thing!

But I have never been a narrow-road person. (Wide Open Spaces by the Dixie Chicks plays in the background).

I have been to 38 countries and all 50 states. I have painted movie worlds, designed spaces, made photographs, written stories, built collections, chased signs, collected fragments, documented grief, documented beauty, documented whatever strange thing was happening just beyond my understanding.

My work has never moved in a straight line.

Neither has my life.

So why have I been demanding that my creative process suddenly march in one?

People have told me I spin a lot of plates. But that has never felt quite right.

To me, it is more like carrying a tray through a cocktail party. Except on the tray is a lazy Susan. I glide through my life with all these little worlds balanced there, and when I set it down, I turn toward the project asking for me that day.

A painting.
A paragraph.
A room.
A memory.
A business idea.
A scrap that makes no sense yet, but feels alive.

I am a person moved by the senses. I listen through texture, color, weather, image, intuition. I do not always decide where the current is moving. Sometimes I just notice where the light is landing and follow it.

I Thought I Was Failing to Focus

There are projects in my life that have been alive for years.

Some of them have changed names. Some have changed form. Some have disappeared for months and then shown back up at the door like, Hello, remember me? I am still very much not finished with you.

My memoir has not only been a book. It has been a film idea. A Substack. A series of paintings. A private archive. A way of understanding what happened to me. A way of looking at who I became because of it.

My art has not only been art. It has been evidence. Souvenirs. Coordinates. Proof that I was somewhere, that I felt something, that I saw the world a certain way and tried to make it visible.

My business has not only been a business. It has been an attempt to create a life where the way I see is not something I have to split off from the way I earn, serve, teach, and live.

None of these things are separate.

That is what I keep missing every time I panic and think, I need to choose.

Choose what?

The painting over the story?

The memoir over the film?

The studio over the business?

The photographs over the spaces?

The life I have lived over the life I am trying to build from it?

Choosing one over the other feels like choosing which child to save in a fire. It is not possible. Because I know they are all speaking to each other.

I am not running five unrelated businesses in my head.

I am building one world in several languages.

The Work Moves Sideways Before It Moves Forward

For 25 years, I worked in film and television creating environments that made a story believable.

You learn very quickly in that world that nothing exists alone.

The wall color matters because of the costume.
The furniture matters because of the character.
The light matters because of the mood.
The texture matters because of the camera.
The smallest object in the corner can quietly tell the audience something before a single word is spoken.

A finished scene may look like one thing.

But it is never made from one thing.

Why would a creative life be any different?

Maybe the reason I keep circling between writing, painting, photographs, rooms, stories, and objects is because I am not creating individual pieces.

Maybe I am designing a scene large enough to live inside.

Maybe I am not supposed to amputate the parts of my work that appear unrelated simply because I have not yet stepped far enough back to see the composition.

Creativity does not always arrive as a straight line from idea to completion.

Sometimes it arrives as a constellation.

A little light here. Another one over there. A strange shape forming in the distance. For a long time, all you can see are scattered points.

Until one day, you realize they have been drawing a map the whole time.

The Difference Between Avoiding and Incubating

Now, let me be very clear: there is a difference between having multiple creative projects and using every new idea as an escape hatch from finishing anything.

I know the difference because I have done both.

There is the electric excitement of a new idea, which can be addictive. There is also the uncomfortable moment when the beautiful idea becomes actual work, and suddenly cleaning the refrigerator feels spiritually urgent.

That is avoidance.

But there is another kind of stepping away.

The kind where you have gone as far as you can go today. The kind where the work has stopped opening and started tightening. The kind where you are staring so hard at the problem that all you can see is the problem.

Sometimes leaving one project for another is not abandoning it.

Sometimes it is letting it breathe.

Sometimes the painting needs you to write the story first.

Sometimes the story needs you to get out of the house and photograph something.

Sometimes the business needs you to make the artwork so you remember why you are building the business in the first place.

Sometimes the thing you are calling distraction is actually cross-pollination.

Sometimes it is your creative life composting itself into richer soil.

For paid subscribers: the part I am practicing now — how to hold all these projects without carrying them all in my body at once.

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I guess this is what happens when you believe your life is one big treasure hunt. Everything you find along the way is just another clue for you to follow to find…well the next clue of course!

I am remembering something one of my dear friends said to me when I was visiting her after she had her baby. We used to travel together a lot and I asked when we would be going on the next adventure. Her reply, “Jolene, you are the adventure.”

That might have been one of the most resonating things someone has ever said to me. I do feel that way. So when I am adventuring, and something catches my eye, it must have meaning.

I find clues to life in the small things. The things most people walk past. A rusted key. A broken handle. A scrap of paper. Something dropped, lost, forgotten.

I don’t see those things as random.

I see them as evidence.

That belief is what became my Nomadic Novelties Series—a book of images made from objects I’ve collected all over the world.

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I didn’t paint it with paint, exactly. It…

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And I mean everything.

Stained glass. Spray work. Aging. Faux concrete. Sign painting. Vinyls. Wood grainin…

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I had that moment walking through Meow Wolf Santa Fe.

People around me were opening drawers, reading clues, following threads of a story unfolding room by room. They were in it—moving through the narrative, letting it carry them forward.

And I was… staring at a wall. Not because I couldn’t read the writing on it. Because I couldn’t stop seeing how it was made.

It’s a weird thing to work in an industry where your job is to make things feel and look real—knowing full well they aren’t. Sometimes even the people.

As a scenic artist, and most recently the charge scenic on The Chair, my entire job is illusion. I paint wood that isn’t wood. Concrete that isn’t concrete. Age things that were built yesterday. I create surfaces that hold history they never lived.

If I do my job right, no one notices. They just believe. As they should.

January in Pittsburgh is not forgiving.

It was cold in that way that settles into your bones and stays there, even after you’ve stood beside a propane heater and been in a warming tent most of the day. We were working long days, moving fast, building an entire world on a schedule that didn’t care how tired you were. It never does.

I was in charge of the paint department. Which sounds straightforward until you realize what that actually means.

Everything you see on camera—every wall, every surface, every aged detail, every prop that needed to match the environment—it all runs through you. You’re managing a crew, solving problems in real time, sourcing materials, adjusting colors under different lighting, and making sure that what looks good in person also reads correctly through a lens.

And you’re doing it while the clock is always running. It’s a lot of pressure but not enough to keep you warm in January.

There’s a moment on every project where it hits you: This will all be gone. Not metaphorically. Literally.

The walls come down. The sets get repurposed or trashed. The work you poured yourself into disappears, leaving behind only what the camera captured.

And you try to make peace with that. Because that’s the job.

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There was a time when a refrigerator was just a r…

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I spent years painting and designing worlds for film, television, and theater — places that had to feel real, even when they weren’t.

So when I got to paint an alien sculpture for a toy store opening,…

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Not metaphorically. Not in the way people say travel “changes you.” I mean I physically opened a refrigerator door and found myself somewhere else entirely.

That’s how my experience began at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.

Rooms folded into other rooms. Doors led to places they shouldn’t. Nothing followed the rules I understood, and somehow, that made perfect sense. It felt like stepping into a dream that didn’t ask permission to exist.

I remember thinking—this is what people must feel like on acid.

I never did acid.

I wanted to. Of course I did doesn’t everyone? I’ve always been drawn to anything that bends reality a little. Anything that loosens the grip of what’s expected and lets something stranger, more expansive, take its place.

But I was afraid I wouldn’t come back.

That fear started when I was thirteen.

A friend of my sister’s showed up at our house one day. His name was well, I should probably not say his name. I don’t remember what he was wearing, but I remember how he looked to me. Off. Like his rhythm didn’t match the room. He stared too long at nothing. Moved a beat too slow. When he did speak, he spoke like he was reaching for something just out of grasp.

He spent most of the time playing pinball. I asked my sister’s other friend if something was wrong with him. He said, “He did a lot of acid and just never came back.”

That was it. That sentence, paired with the way I saw him that moment, was enough for me. I never touched it. Because I didn’t want to leave and not recognize the person who returned. I also am not that into pinball and couldn’t imagine having to play it every day in my life to be tied to reality.

But walking through Meow Wolf, I realized something. You don’t need drugs to experience altered reality. You just need a doorway.

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It is different from painting. Painting makes me work for it. I have to adjust, ruin…

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The second time, a widow.

When I was about six years old, my grandparents bought me a blue beret for my birthday because I said I wanted to be an artist.

Why? To travel the world, of course. Everyone knows artists have a lot of money and definitely aren’t starving.

I had my eyes set on Paris, so I started saving money in a giant plastic Coke bottle my dad got me for Christmas. His dog had chewed it up pretty good by the time it made its way to me, but it was still usable. The perfect container to house my dreams. What a metaphor for my up-and-coming life.

That same year, my mom bought me a sweatshirt with Singapore, Tokyo, and a few other cities printed across the front. It was mostly pink, blue, and yellow, and I wore that sweatshirt out.

When I got too big for it, I cut out the front with the cities on it and tucked it into one of the many totes I would carry with me over the next thirty years.

I still have it today.

Getting my license at sixteen felt like my first real act of freedom. Oh, the fun I had in that 1988 Monte Carlo I painted turquoise blue, with a 350 engine. I went everywhere.

By the time I met my husband, Patrick, I had already been to a bunch of different cities and a handful of countries, mostly traveling alone. I was always a little scared to leave the country, but I never let the fear stop me.

I think it’s important to see new things. To let your neurons fire in unfamiliar directions. To remind yourself the world is bigger than whatever room you are currently standing in.

When I met Patrick, he was as adventurous as I was, and that felt amazing. A travel buddy. Someone who not only wanted to go but had his own ideas about it.

Driving across the country was something I had never done before, and Taos was one of the places we passed through on that trip. We laughed so much along the way. Honestly, the things I remember most are not all the landmarks and such.

I remember laughing so hard while we sat in a ridiculous amount of traffic coming into Denver. I remember the photograph of the tree with the lightning. That memory sits at the top of my list.

When I look back at the other photos from that year, they stir things in me. I love photographs for that reason. I hate them for that reason. Writing all of this down and looking back at those images is happily painful. There is no other way to describe it. (Guess you have to do that when you are writing a memoir.)

I am happy to have experienced his love and the life we had, and it is painful to know it ended too soon, with so many dreams and goals unfinished. Unexplored. Unlived.

I feel that way about art. Writing. Friendships. Places. Versions of myself I was just beginning to understand.

There is such a constant presence of time moving forward, with or without you.

What a gift. What a nuisance. The not knowing. I mean, if I knew when I was going to go, I could probably plan things out more accordingly. At the very least, life would be distilled down to choosing only the most important moments.

But it all feels important to me.

That is why my life often feels like one long run-on sentence. My feelings, too. Maybe that is what being present is. Feeling both things at the same time.

When I look back at those photographs, they tell the story of a thirty-year-old married woman trekking through Taos, scared of a storm and also knowing she could survive one.

I meet her again when I see those images.

I meet the moment again.

But from a new perspective. A new angle. Through the lens of a woman who has lost her husband, survived the loss, and learned how to thrive despite the pain.

When I went back to Taos years later, I took that same road. I looked for that tree. Maybe it was the company in the car. Maybe it was because I was the one driving that time. Maybe grief changes the way the landscape lets itself be seen.

But I never found it.

Or maybe I just did not need to see it again.

I have been known to go back to places to collect a little part of myself that feels like it went missing there. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I realize I don’t have to. And sometimes it is enough to have a piece of art fall out of me like this one.

Part of my Emotional Atmospheres series, this piece is built from real photographic moments combined into a single emotionally resonant frame.

Every image has a location. This one had a ghost.

Paid subscribers can keep reading for the behind-the-scenes story of “The Road”, the job that terrified me, the beach that stayed with me, and the part of myself I had to go back and reclaim.

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It wasn’t the biggest thing in the landscape. It didn’t demand attention. But something about it held the entire scene together. Quiet, grounded, completely itself.

I kept thinking about it after I left Taos. So I painted it.

This is my way of holding onto a moment that didn’t ask to be remembered—but stayed anyway.

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I used to get a terrifying feeling in my stomach when something went wrong. A physiological alarm. I was three years old the first time it hit, when my mom yelled “JOLENEEEEEEE!” from the other room.

Sheer terror rose in the pit of my belly. I grew to know it well: “The Stomach Drop.” In my short life, I’d learned that feeling meant one of three things:

1. Something has gone terribly wrong and it is my fault.

2. Someone found out something has gone wrong and it might be my fault.

3. Nothing is wrong, but I feel guilty anyway.

In 2012, I was somewhere between Pennsylvania and Colorado, driving west with no plan other than to get there. We dropped south into New Mexico. Taos wasn’t the destination; it was just where we ended up.

I remember the canyon opening up into rolling gold mountains—or maybe they were hills. They looked like someone had draped gold velvet over the earth. The sun was mind-blowing. I wondered: Are the sunsets always like this here?

Near the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge, the sky split open. It didn’t feel stable. It became one of the top ten moments in my history of travel. Light broke through in one direction; darkness gathered in another. It was the kind of sky that makes you stop without knowing why.

Everything happened at once: a rainbow cutting the background, lightning striking the distance, a storm sitting right in the center of it all.

And this tree.

It didn’t feel like a tree. It felt placed. A marker. Like it had something to say. I took one of the best photographs of my life in that moment—not because I planned it, but because I was standing in it.

I remember feeling unsettled. Not scared, not unsafe—just antsy. My stomach did that familiar drop. It was my first time in the desert and I didn’t know if I should be feeling excitement, fear, or awe. I guess I felt them all, which is why the stomach drop was there.

Seven years later, I went back to Taos. I almost didn’t; the first experience felt too remarkable to touch. But I like to challenge things—even nature—to show off.

This time, I brought two friends. Both strong, intelligent, opinionated women who had never met each other. Since they were both friends of mine, I thought they would get along. I thought it would be an easy trip.

It wasn’t.

There was friction. A tension between different ways of moving through the world. I remember watching it, not just as a participant, but as an observer. It was like that sunset years ago, but more unnerving.

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Nothing on a film set is accidental. All visual aspects are calculated to evoke a feeling—the way the light lands on an actress’s face, the intentional reflection in a window, the aging door at the front of a well-kept house. Someone made each of those decisions, and usually a dozen times in a dozen different ways, before they landed on “that’s the shot.”

I spent years working as a scenic artist on set, which is a strange job to explain, mostly because people don’t realize it exists. If something needed to be painted, aged, dulled, brightened, reflected differently, or completely reworked to read correctly on camera, it landed in my hands. Sometimes I had a decent amount of time to do the task, but often I didn’t.

It’s a chaotic, fast-moving environment with a lot of moving parts—so many that I often wonder how anything actually gets done.

I get called in when something isn’t working: a reflection is wrong, a color is off, a surface isn’t telling the right story.

And I fix it—not based on logic, but based on feel.

There were days I was adjusting the aging of a sticker by mere millimeters, knocking down a shine no one else noticed yet, or painting something with whatever was available—because the materials didn’t matter as much as the result. The camera would catch it, even if no one else could.

That’s the part people don’t understand. You’re not painting for what something is; you’re painting for how it reads. How it visually tells the story.

Over time, something shifts. You stop looking at things the way they are and start seeing them for what they’re doing—what they’re saying, what they’re reinforcing, what they’re quietly giving away.

A room isn’t just a room anymore. It’s a story, a signal, a set, a visual direction to another world.

And once that clicks, you can’t just turn it off. No matter where you go in the world.

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When I started writing, I was trying to define what it was… poetry, literature, short stories, essays? In the recesses of my mind, I have always wanted to write lyrics for music. Having no real background in writing, it’s hard to find your way. Also, who am I to be a writer anyway?

If you asked my late husband, he described me as a writer disguised as a painter. Hehehe… look how tricky I am. The truth is, I have been writing longer than I have been painting. The truth is, I have volumes of written words. The truth is, I have secretly been writing and submitting work for many years.

I just don’t talk about it.

People know me as a painter. An artist. And those are two of my many loves. What they don’t know is that when I sit down to write, it is literally like I am a musician at the keys. Things just flow from me. And I allow it.

Of course, not everything I write is good. It’s also not all bad. But how would you know unless I shared it?

So… I’m sharing it.

I want to invite you into this part of my work.

On a canvas, I show you how I see the world.

These lyrical essays, built on metaphor, are how I move through it—the moving images my mind creates as I go.

I don’t know about you, but I get lost in moments. Visual ones.

I’m usually in it before I understand it.

Something stands out.
Something feels slightly off.
Something lingers longer than it should.

And I stay with it.

A sunset.
A pebble.
A person.

And then—somewhere in that— something shifts.

Not because it was explained. Because I noticed it.

Not to understand it— but to see what reveals itself when you stop trying to.

Here’s one of those moments.

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