That was when I stopped counting.

People like to talk about moving as a fresh start. A new beginning. A chance to reinvent yourself. Try doing it every year. Sometimes two or three times.

Eventually, starting over stops feeling hopeful and starts feeling like a way of life. Home becomes wherever you happen to land, and you learn not to get too attached to the idea that anything—or anyone—is going to stay. Even yourself.

Maybe you know that feeling even if you never moved thirty times. One day you look around and realize the life you built fits a version of you who is no longer entirely there.

By the time I graduated from high school, I had been to at least eight different schools. From the outside, I probably looked like a force to be reckoned with. Stubborn. Angry. Unruly. There was nothing you could tell me that I didn’t already think I knew.

Inside, of course, was another story.

I was scared. Hurt. Confused. And every time we landed somewhere new, I had to figure out who I was going to be there.

What version of me would work in this place? How much could I show? What would make people leave me alone? What might make them like me? But the gift in this was that I really started not to care about any of those questions the longer time went on.

But the moving ritual itself never changed: pack as much as you could into as little as you could. Land somewhere new. Set up camp.

No one really knew how long we would be there or when we might have to leave again, but while we were there, I needed some small part of it to feel like mine.

So I unpacked the boxes every time. I shared a bedroom with my sister, but I claimed my half. I arranged my things. I taped pictures to the walls and made collages out of places I wanted to go, things I wanted to have, and versions of myself I imagined I might someday become.

I took whatever had survived the move—old photographs, scraps, hand-me-downs, leftover pieces of things—and made something out of them.

I didn’t have language for any of this then. But I think I was building evidence that I existed beyond whatever was happening around me.

I couldn’t control where we lived. I couldn’t control how long we stayed. I definitely couldn’t control what happened inside the house.

But I could decide where my things went.

I could make one little corner look like me. Or at least look like the person I hoped might eventually be me.

I think we all do some version of this. We arrange the shelf. Hang the photograph. Keep the chair. Paint the wall. Sometimes we are not decorating at all. We are leaving little clues for ourselves about who we are.

Maybe that was the first time I learned that a room could do more than hold your belongings.

It could hold you.

Years later, I ended up painting worlds for a living.

Scenery. Sets. Rooms that needed to convince you they had existed long before you walked into them. Places that might only be there for a day, or a week, or until somebody yelled, “Wrap!” and we tore the entire thing apart.

Which, now that I think about it, was probably a very logical career choice for someone who had spent half her life becoming emotionally attached to temporary structures.

I knew how to make a place believable. I had been practicing forever. What I wouldn’t know yet was that I had also been practicing something else.

Ten years ago, after Patrick died, I emptied my house. Not because I wanted a different house. Because I had absolutely no idea who lived there anymore.

I knew the person I had been before him. I knew who I had been with him. But the person without him? TBD, my friends.

So I did what, apparently, I have always done when I don’t know where I am. I started moving things. Actually, first I got rid of almost everything.

Looking back now, I wish I had made a time-lapse of that house over the next ten years. It would probably explain me better than I could.

The house went from stuffed full of things to almost empty and then, slowly, full again.

At one point, there was basically a rug and a yoga mat in the living room.

For a while, I turned the entire living and dining room into my paint studio, which I loved until I realized I had created a place to make things but nowhere to actually sit down and rest.

The couch was gone. That couch had belonged to the life Patrick and I had together, and every time I looked at it, I remembered him sick. It had cancer all over it. It stopped being furniture. It became a place I had to revisit every time I walked into the room. So I tossed it. Because what is the use of trying to be happy when what you are looking at is just making you sad?

For years, the house kept changing. I feel like it went from a home to a prison, keeping all the sadness in with no way out. Then a prison into an empty space where I could sort out those feelings. And when I was ready, it went from a space to a studio where I could create something new of myself. A storage unit for various versions of myself.

And then, eventually, I bought another couch.

A proper couch.

That sounds like a ridiculously ordinary thing to mark as progress, but grief has a strange way of making ordinary things enormous. A couch meant I expected to sit somewhere. Maybe rest. Maybe have people over. Maybe stay awhile.

I could practically date different versions of myself by photographs of the rooms. Here was the woman who needed everything gone. Here was the woman who needed to create. Here was the woman who could tolerate a few things coming back.

Here was the woman who could finally sit down.

And somewhere during those ten years, I began to realize I wasn’t just decorating. I was trying to answer a question. The question I thought I was answering was:

How do I become myself again?

Except that actually wasn’t the question at all. Because you don’t become yourself again. Not completely. Life doesn’t always give you that option. Sometimes something happens, and the old way of being simply doesn’t work anymore.

A big change like death, marriage, kids, or nothing dramatic at all can elicit being lost. You just wake up one day and realize the life around you was assembled by a version of you who isn’t entirely here anymore.

And then what?

I think I have been answering that question with rooms since I was a kid. Back then, I taped pictures to my half of a bedroom because I needed some evidence of a future.

After Patrick died, I emptied a house because I needed enough blank space to discover one. Same instinct. Different room. Same way of interpreting a life, different decade.

It also explains something about the work I have always been drawn to.

Yes, I can paint a wall, design a set, move furniture around, build an entire imaginary world, or take apart a room and put it back together differently.

But, for me, the interesting part was never really making things pretty.

I’ve spent most of my life watching what happens when people—and places—have to become something else.

I’ve done it professionally. I’ve done it personally. I’ve done it badly. And I’ve done some truly weird shit! But I know the territory. I have mapped out this terrain and set flags along the way.

Because I know we leave evidence everywhere.

Not just in dramatic things. In ordinary things. In what we keep, what we move, what we avoid, and what suddenly starts bothering us for reasons we cannot quite explain. Sometimes our spaces reveal the change before we do.

In the couch we cannot stand to look at anymore. In the boxes we keep moving from house to house without opening. In the room that somehow became storage instead of a spare room. In the photographs still taped to a wall. In the empty corner. In the thing we finally bring back.

I spent years thinking I was trying to make myself feel at home in a place.

I wasn’t.

I was trying to figure out how to feel at home in myself, even when I kept changing.

Funny enough, I stopped counting the houses at thirty.

I’m still counting the versions of me.

Ten Years of One Living Room

Almost 15 years ago, we moved into this house. The photo on the left is

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I honestly don’t know why I went to Nova Scotia.

Something happened to me somewhere between the end of June and the beginning of July, and I guess I just kind of hit a breaking point.

It had been about two years since I had traveled anywhere internationally, and for anybody who knows me, you know this is not good for me. Like, borderline I’m-going-to-lose-my-shit territory.

A little backstory: I have been looking for a church to buy because I want to start my own creative church. And Nova Scotia kept popping up in my searches with these tiny white churches and red roofs, and I think that is probably what first piqued my interest.

But I didn’t really know anything about Nova Scotia.

I just knew I wanted to get out of town. I wanted to go international, but I didn’t want to go too far. And I love coastal towns.

AKA I needed a reason to use my passport!

One of my favorite places I have ever been is Anstruther, a little fishing town in the East Neuk of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. It is the kind of place with a working harbor, old fishing buildings, boats, and narrow streets that makes me immediately start wondering what happened here. It is also home to the Scottish Fisheries Museum, housed in a collection of historic buildings, some dating to the 16th century.

That is the kind of place I am drawn to. Places at the edge of things. Places that show me time has passed with their old buildings and hand tied knots.

So maybe I thought Nova Scotia would give me some of that.

But instead, what I found seemed to be people who were standing in transitional doorways themselves.

First there was Tim, who was writing his memoir.

Then there was Margaret.

Margaret had recently put her husband into a care facility because of his dementia. She sold antiques out of her house, and I just happened upon her while driving down a back road. I walked out of there with a pound of old newspapers and ephemera I want to use to make art from.

Then there was Sara, the daughter of Martinique, who ran the tiny bed-and-breakfast where we stayed.

Martinique had fostered more than 80 children. I said: eighty.

Sara was one of her biological children, and now she is forging her own way—literally—as a blacksmith in Nova Scotia.

Then there was the church theater.

I happened to see this enormous moose outside and obviously needed to know what the hell was going on in there.

So I went inside.

And I couldn’t believe what was happening.

Here was this church being used as a theater, filled with people making something together, a scarecrow village for the fall. Another strange little place I had accidentally walked into because something outside made me curious enough to stop.

And then, as I made my way to the other side of Nova Scotia, I met Dena.

I was on a short walk, just checking out the coastline, when I started talking to her.

Her mother had just died.

It was the first day she had gone outside.

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have been traveling and some stranger I met along the way somehow got me through whatever I was trying to process.

My airplane strangers.

My train strangers.

My standing-in-line-at-the-checkout strangers.

My crying-in-a-bathroom strangers.

Literally. All of those things have happened.

There is something about strangers.

Maybe it is because they don’t know the story you have already told everyone else about yourself.

They only know the person standing in front of them.

And maybe that gives us permission to be someone slightly different for a minute.

Or maybe we’re almost always meeting people in the middle of becoming someone they have never been before.

At least I seem to meet those people. Maybe because I recognize them.

I feel like my whole life has been about transformation.

I’ve had to transform myself over and over again. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, knowing full well I’m probably going to keep burning.

And strangely, I’m actually okay with that. (Yay, bring it on!)

Turns out I have Scorpio in my chart. Scorpio is associated with death, rebirth and transformation, and Pluto shows up pretty loudly in my chart too. If you are into that kind of astrology stuff.

Apparently I was built for this.

I mean, truly.

I went to Nova Scotia not even knowing why I was going.

I just knew I was tired of doing what I had been doing.

And somewhere along the way, I ended up at the Bay of Fundy.

The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. At the head of the bay, the difference between high and low tide can reach about 16 metres—the height of a four-story building. When the tide goes out, whole stretches of ocean floor are exposed. You can literally walk where, hours earlier, there was an ocean.

And it is wildly weird.

It feels a little like walking into the apocalypse.

The water is just...gone.

Boats sit where boats should absolutely not be sitting. Mud and rock and seaweed stretch out in front of you. The entire landscape has been emptied of the thing that normally defines it.

And underneath is this whole other world that was there the entire time.

You just couldn’t see it.

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Being the person in front has always been much harder.

I learned early how to read a room. My childhood was shaped by chaos and domestic violence, so I became highly attuned to what was happening around me—the energy, the tension, the things being said without words. That awareness eventually made me very good at creating environments and telling stories visually. It also made me very good at staying useful behind the scenes without allowing myself to be fully seen.

That is something I am trying to change.

This past February, I attended a Chinese New Year celebration where an intuitive was answering questions onstage. I had been challenging myself to do more things that made me uncomfortable, because I believe those same things make me feel most alive.

So I stood up in front of a room full of people and asked my question.

When I spoke about the work I am building now—bringing aesthetics and awareness together, helping people read their own rooms, understand what their spaces are revealing, and create environments that better reflect the lives they are trying to live—Jenny D was listening.

Afterward, she approached me and invited me onto her podcast.

That small act of bravery led to this podcast conversation.

We talked about art, grief, signs from the other side, rebuilding a life, working behind the scenes in the entertainment industry, and what it means to finally step forward and tell your own story.

This conversation was not simply about my work.

It was part of the work.

It was me practicing what I am still learning: I do not have to disappear in order to create something meaningful.

Thank you, Jenny, for giving me such a warm and honest place to step forward.

Listen to our conversation here—and please follow Jenny while you are there. She tells real stories about real people, and I believe we need more of that type of honesty out there.

New here?

That line, from the children’s book by Glenn Ringtved, recently came up in my Facebook memories. I had posted it eight years ago.

My response to it today was:

That is like asking the sky to show us the sun, but not the shadows.

I am standing inside an elementary school about half an hour from my house. I am surrounded by two little girls and their mothers, and together we are creating a mural.

I am showing the girls how to paint with a toothbrush—how to load it with paint and pull a finger across the bristles so that tiny flecks scatter across the wall. It is a great way to make sand.

They are watching me closely, paying attention to every word. Their excitement over using a toothbrush for something other than teeth is palpable. They practice on a piece of cardboard before I cut them loose on the actual wall.

You would have thought I had handed them magic wands.

Standing there, I feel the full resonance of what art can do in our most devastating moments.

It can create a doorway where there was none.

It can become words for things that were never spoken.

It cannot keep a heart from breaking. But sometimes, slowly and imperfectly, it can help stitch together what remains.

The Two Sisters

I met two extraordinary little girls during COVID. They were sisters, two and a half and five years old.

The older sister, Avery, loved science and art. Their grandmother, who is a good friend of mine, told me that the younger sister, Rilyn, was undergoing cancer treatment.

She was only two and a half.

I could feel that her older sister needed an outlet too. She was trying to remain a little girl while her family’s life revolved around hospitals, treatments, and uncertainty.

Around that time, their grandmother told me they had tried to raise a monarch butterfly, but the caterpillar had died.

I immediately reached out to my Facebook community and asked whether anyone had monarch caterpillars growing in their gardens.

Many messages and several hours later, I located thirteen of them more than an hour away.

I met the girls’ grandfather in the parking lot of an Olive Garden to make the exchange, which is the kind of wonderfully strange thing people did during COVID to create moments of connection.

For the next several weeks, Avery and I raised our separate groups of monarchs together.

Everything was virtual. Through video after video, we both learned about the magic of the monarch. Admittedly, I think I was more excited than any of them.

Other families began following the adventure through the photographs and videos I posted on Instagram. I had never raised monarch butterflies before, and I became completely fascinated by them—their transformation, their fragility, and their almost impossible migration. And by the fact that I could successfully raise something other than mold in my paint buckets.

The monarch's journey happens across generations. Several generations move north, each continuing a journey it will never complete. Then one remarkable, long-lived generation travels all the way back south to Mexico.

None of them is given the entire map. Each one simply carries the journey as far as it can.

Navigation began appearing everywhere in my work and thinking: how we know where to go, what guides us, and what happens when the map we were following suddenly disappears. During that same period, I was even commissioned to create a painting that would be auctioned to support monarch conservation.

Avery and I also began doing art classes together online. She called me “her artist.” I have to tell you, it was the best feeling when I started Zoom one day, and there was little Avery dressed in an artist’s outfit, complete with a tiny beret.

She was ready to paint.

When Rilyn eventually became stable enough, they both came to my house and painted with me in person.

It was a beautiful day.

Rilyn had spent so much of her life going in and out of Children’s Hospital. Her sister had spent those same years trying to have something resembling a normal childhood. That afternoon, in my little Casa Petita garage, they were simply two sisters making art.

Rilyn’s Corner

Now I am standing inside their elementary school, painting Rilyn’s Corner.

Rilyn died on November 29, 2025, after courageously fighting neuroblastoma for five and a half years. But she was not only a little girl with cancer. She was a joyful, loving light and full of hope. Her love for Lilo & Stitch, Taylor Swift, stuffed animals, and fluffy dogs was unmatched.

Her grandmother, my dear friend, called me in March to ask whether I would design and paint a mural in her memory. She told me the family had been given a small amount of money to help cover the supplies.

Now Rilyn’s sister, Rilyn’s best friend, their mothers, and I are standing together in front of this enormous wall.

We are painting sea turtles on a sandy beach.

From the beginning, I designed the mural so that anyone who loved Rilyn and wanted to help could place their own hand inside its creation.

They will remember this for the rest of their lives. They will know that they helped make something beautiful for a little girl who touched so many lives during her very short life.

I cannot begin to imagine what it takes for these girls to stand here and paint after something so traumatic. But I also know from my own experience that resilience is a muscle—one built slowly through love, support, and the courage to keep showing up.

I cannot help but wonder who these children will become because of the strength, tenderness, and connection being formed around Rilyn now.

Children are often asked to carry enormous things while adults search for the right words. Art does not demand that we find them. It gives our hands somewhere to place what we are carrying.

In that moment, surrounded by sea turtles and beaches, I watched Rilyn’s best friend—dressed in a Lilo & Stitch outfit—come alive as she flicked paint from a toothbrush. Beside her, Avery gently showed her how to hold it, how to aim the paint, and encouraged her to keep going.

Watching them, I could see the big sister Avery had been to Rilyn being carried forward into this moment.

Designing an Escape

Rilyn loved Hawaii. She loved Lilo & Stitch, a story about family, belonging, and the promise that no one should be left behind or forgotten.

Hawaii also has a deep personal meaning for me.

When her family told me I could design the mural however I wanted, the connection felt immediate. Her mom sent me one of her favorite photographs of the two girls on the beach for inspiration.

I completed what I thought was the final design last Thursday. But something did not feel right.

I kept returning to it—shifting the landscape, simplifying some elements, moving others, and trying to understand what the wall itself was asking for.

The first version was cute, but it felt impersonal. It needed more than decoration. It needed symbolism. I wanted every element to feel like part of the same story, each one carrying some piece of the larger idea that nothing exists alone.

The finished design contains a beach, calm blue water, distant land, palm trees, sea turtles, dolphins, a rainbow, a friendly tiki figure, and two children sitting side by side on paddle boards, facing away from us and looking toward the horizon.

Each piece carries something.

The water creates movement without chaos. It gives the eye somewhere to travel.

The horizon suggests that something still exists beyond the moment we are standing in, even when we cannot reach it yet.

The turtles carry endurance, protection, and the ability to find their way home across enormous distances.

The rainbow is both weather and promise: light and water meeting after a storm. A bridge between this life and whatever may come after it.

The two children on the paddle boards are together, but they are not being asked to speak. They are allowed simply to sit beside each other and look outward.

The dolphin in the water before them is a gentle, playful guide toward healing.

The cardinal as a symbol for all of those who continue to speak to use from the other side.

The butterfly connects the mural to those early COVID days, to transformation, and to a journey continued across generations. Rilyn’s mom also told me that she had always referred to Rilyn as her butterfly.

This could not feel like a memorial children were afraid to touch. It needed to feel alive. I wanted to create a place where children could feel transported for a few moments. A decompression space made from paint.

Here is a glimpse of that little world beginning to take shape.

The mural is near the cafeteria, in the middle of all the noise and movement of an elementary school. Just down the hall, there will now be a small hidden world where a child can pause and feel held by the space—not singled out, not watched, and not required to explain why they need it.

My background in scenic art, color theory, visual storytelling, and feng shui all came into the design. I wanted the colors to feel calm without being dull. I wanted the landscape to move the eye gently through the wall. I wanted the space to feel protective without feeling closed in.

I wanted children to feel that they belonged there. A children’s mural must hold joy first. But sometimes joy is a secret gateway into healing grief.

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Below, I am sharing the more personal layer beneath this mural: why creating a place for grief feels so connected to my own loss, what this project has taught me about the ways people measure pain, and why I believe making something beautiful can help us live beside what cannot be fixed.

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This story.

My story.

When I sat down and dedicated one month to writing a memoir, I didn’t know over 80,000 words were going to come out. Letters spilled onto the page, sentence after sentence, and for the first time it felt intentional. Not like the folders upon folders of writing I already had on my computer. Not like the poems, fragments, journal entries, and things I wrote only when I felt inspired or desperate or cracked open enough to get something down.

This was different.

I sat down on purpose, and more than 80,000 words came out of my mouth.

It is a really weird thing to see your whole life on paper.

I did that in one month.

It was November, which was probably a dumb idea. November is the worst month of my life. It comes right on the heels of my wedding anniversary on Halloween. Then my husband’s birthday. Then his death anniversary a few weeks later.

Why I chose November, I’ll never know. But let me just tell you, there was no dry December in my house after I saw all those words in front of me.

I think I kind of just short-circuited.

Then I thought, I can never publish this. So I sat on it. And then I kept writing anyway. Because I still don’t know how to tell this story. And that is what I am supposed to be good at.

Story.

But this one covers marriage and travel and art and illness and death and grief and survival and becoming and lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

Okay, maybe not tigers and bears.

But definitely lions.

I had a lion when I was a child. Well, it wasn’t really mine. It was my dad’s. But it definitely belongs in the memoir.

Anyway. Getting back to what I was saying.

The real story, for me, starts when I met my late husband. And that story still feels way too alive to hold in a straight line.

It has been really hard to structure this memoir. And structure is definitely something that challenges me. I have to trick myself into thinking structure is a path to freedom, because if I don’t use the word freedom somewhere near the word structure, I will automatically not sit down and do any of it.

A friend once told me my life was a journey that should only be taken on paper.

She wasn’t wrong.

The question is: how many papers?

I told another friend recently that my life has been heavy-fated. And I mean, come on. In the past nine months alone, my father was killed head-on in a car crash and my mother just got out of brain surgery.

That is only nine months. I have been alive for a long time. Heavy. Fate.

Someone asked me the other day how I got so talented, and I’ll be honest, the answer is pain.

I have been through a lot of pain. I have been through a lot of loss. I have also been through a lot of adventures. And I am resilient AF. The pain forced me to create. I was like a Jedi using the force.

And I still am.

At some point, I realized I had been documenting my whole life with art.

Everything I have ever created is a visual document of what I have endured. I have documented my life through photography, everywhere I have ever been. I have documented it through writing, too. In the beginning, most of it was poems.

I wrote a lot of poetry.

A lot.

I have a stack of printed poetry in my house that sits almost three feet tall. I am not lying, folks.

I am not saying it is all good. Some of it probably reads more like a journal. But it was all those letters, all that pain, all that trying to make something out of what I could not understand, that helped me foster creativity, art, and writing.

My house used to feel alive when Patrick was here. And part of it died along with him. I had to resuscitate something from within myself to become the woman I am now. That does not mean the reminders are gone. They live in every corner of every room I walk through.

I keep thinking the memoir should begin neatly. Like I should be able to take my own life and make it into chapters and arcs and outlines and something people not only chew on, but something they don’t want to stop eating.

That is a lot of pressure. And I try not to think about it too much, because if I think about it too much, I won’t do it.

But what am I supposed to say?

Here is where I was born. Here is what happened. Here is who I loved. Here is how I became this version of myself. P.S. Insert dying husband here.

That is not how memory works.

Memory doesn’t arrive in chapters. At least not for me. It arrives in flashes.

A room. A song. A smell. A place. An old video. A photograph I can barely look at. A voice I still expect to hear. The feeling of coming home to someone who made the world make sense.

This house used to pulse with creativity.

Private Friday night dance parties. Music downstairs. LED lights flashing disco from the front window when I pulled up to the house. A bottle of Jameson on the counter with a shot glass next to it.

I could hear the music from the garage before I even got inside. I knew he was down there working on something he thought was a fantastic painting. I knew there would be some ridiculous energy already waiting for me, maybe in the form of a canvas, maybe in the form of dinner on the grill gone wrong.

I knew before I even opened the door.

Man, we had fun.

Two kids running around the world together. Making movies. Traveling to faraway places. Emptying our bags into the trash just so we could fill them with artifacts we found on the Thames River in England. I swore TSA was never going to let us through.

But they did.

It is strange how cancer can erase some things in your mind. Sometimes it is hard for me to remember him before the grief, before the hospital rooms, before the panic, before the quiet that came after, when there was so much life here.

The walls went silent.

The cancer did not just consume him.

It consumed us.

It consumed what we were.

Sometimes I go through his old journals and things he left behind, and I laugh because I remember how much fun we had. And when I read the pages I have written about our life together, I am sadly and happily reminded of how good it was.

Cancer made me forget that for a while because it was so fucking hard.

I don’t walk through my house the same way anymore.

But I can still hear some things in my mind.

Patrick just had a way about him. Everyone said he was big. Big presence. Big laugh. Big energy. Big love. And a big smile.

He was the kind of person who changed the temperature of a room just by entering it. The kind of person people still talk about because of all his antics and way of being.

He has become a reference point here. On jobs. In rooms. In stories. In the way people still say his name.

I found a Post-it note the other day from when we first met. He said: I feel alive with you, Jols.

So I guess we did that for each other.

We lived on a little dead-end street in a tiny house we called Casa Petita. A tiny house with a big life inside of it. I don’t know how this house didn’t burst from all the music and plans and paint clothes and stories and laughter,

And Ideas. So many ideas. Whether it was a new painting, movie script or the next wild road trip.

That is where part of this memoir lives.

Not just in what happened at the end.

In what existed before the ending.

I think that is why it has taken me so long to know how to tell it. Because people understand tragedy quickly. They understand the sentence: my husband died. They understand cancer. They understand loss, at least from the outside.

But how do you explain the size of the love before the loss?

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I ask because bricks are one of those ordinary things we stop seeing, even though they are holding up half the visual world around us.

As a scenic artist, that is part of my job — to look around and notice all the little nuances of everyday things in order to make them believable.

I almost want to say, before you read any further, I need you to go outside and walk around your block. I need you to actually look at the surfaces of the houses, or the bricks specifically, if you have any. Notice all the tiny details that make up each and every brick. The things that make them believable as, well, bricks.

One of the things I wish I had started doing a long time ago, when I began my art career, was measuring every single piece of brick I had ever painted. I am pretty sure it would be well over 10,000 feet.

Did you know that most of what you see in movies and television, especially façades in closed areas, is fake? We make it look real.

When I paint brick, I am not painting rectangles. I am painting evidence.

Here’s a great example.

Here is some brick I painted from the theater performance of August Wilson’s Fences.

Here is another image of a police station. I can’t remember what it was for, but it was a television show.

And here is yet another example of brick from a different movie called Sorority Row. The photo on the left is of the real house with a fake facade being built so the house would match the script. The photo on the right was what I had to paint to make it match.

One of my favorite things to do while traveling is take photographs of bricks.

It is amazing to me how many different variations there are. Everywhere you look. Especially in European countries. My whole camera roll is filled with images of bricks.

And when I think about them in the deepest sense, as I zoom in, we make these little squares, surround them with bricks, and then we live inside them. We create our little lives inside our little squares, and they become a reflection of our minds.

Yeah, I’m going deep here.

Bricks are not just bricks. They hold memory for some. They hold meaning for others. They are the façade, the face of what you might see as you travel down a city block. Each one holds a story. Everything you see on it holds a story.

That splash of mud from someone’s shoe when they stepped in a puddle.

That can of Coke that got opened and splattered all over the side of the bricks.

The salt from the trucks as they came through and tried to clear off all the ice in the winter.

The gum from that little boy’s mouth that he carelessly pushed right onto the brick.

They become a canvas for graffiti artists and other artists alike. They become a canvas for kids with chalk and markers and whatever else they can get their hands on.

If you think about it, bricks can also be weapons. We’ve seen it in movies, where somebody gets slammed up against a brick wall and hurts their head.

One of my favorite things about working on movies is that we get to be in places nobody else dares to go, or wants to go.

For instance, I think I have seen every single alley brick within a 30-mile radius of Pittsburgh. I love alleyway bricks. They tell so much more of a story, especially if you are in an alley where there are a bunch of restaurants. You walk back there and look around, and it is crazy what you can find on those bricks. I won’t go into detail here, but next time you are out and about, you should check it out. Walk down an alley or two.

Occasionally, cars crash into them. The UPS truck, with its back door swung open by the wind, smacks into the brick and knocks it out.

Like I said, bricks have a story.

You would be surprised how many different colors are in bricks.

Which is probably why, when I needed to find my way back into painting, I started with bricks.

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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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