Shift, Shift, Pivot, Pivot

Shift, shift, pivot, pivot.

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.