Entropy is a quiet drift.
A loosening of structure over time. Not collapse—just a gradual loss of tension.
After I closed my studio in early 2021, I slipped into a state of entropy.
My world shrank. I went from working in a space outside my home—connected to the public, expansive enough to support multiple ideas unfolding at once—to trying to compress everything back into a domestic workspace that felt woefully inadequate. Where I once thought big and worked big, I started thinking smaller out of necessity.
Everything contracted.
Why the shift?
Life. COVID. A convergence of realities that didn’t leave much room for choice.
As much as I wanted to live as a full-time artist, it wasn’t sustainable. Monetizing a passion sounds elegant in theory, but the practice is far messier—and often comes at the expense of the very thing that made the work meaningful to begin with.
I didn’t stop creating after the studio closed, but my practice changed. Momentum slowed. Discipline wavered. Connections—to people, to audience, to purpose—began to fray.
The Inward Turn
I withdrew further inward. I wanted engagement, but I also didn’t want exposure. I wanted connection, but not the vulnerability that comes with it. So I kept my world small, contained, manageable.
The problem is this: while being a full-time artist wasn’t sustainable, not being an artist at all is even less so.
As my practice continued to erode, so did my mental health. I tried to fill the void with other things—work, travel, distraction—but none of it touched the deeper absence. Over time, it felt less like burnout and more like a slow withering. As if something essential was being starved of oxygen.
And that’s where I find myself now.
I’ve always lived in extremes. As someone who lives with bipolar disorder, my experience of the world often polarizes—productive or paralyzed, deeply engaged or entirely withdrawn. The middle ground has always been the hardest place to inhabit.
Balance—the quiet, sustainable kind—has never come easily. For a long time, I thought I’d figured out a workaround. That I could ride waves of intense creativity without paying the cost on the other side. That I could stay elevated without crashing.
I was wrong.
When the studio closed, I crashed—hard.
So hard, in fact, that it took a long time to realize I’d fallen. The descent was slow enough to feel like stasis. And by the time I hit the ground, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stand back up.
But here I am.
Not with a plan. Not with answers. Just with a growing restlessness—a sense that the inward phase has run its course. That contraction did what it needed to do, and staying there any longer comes at too high a cost.
This isn’t a relaunch.
It’s not a declaration.
It’s simply a reopening of the channel.
A small step back toward engagement. Toward friction. Toward letting the work exist in conversation with the world again.
For now, that’s enough.
