Small Steps, Big Shifts

On Finding Your People: The Ones Who meet you where you are.

I've been drawing since I was a child.

Through school (instead of taking notes, sorry teachers), in every spare moment I could steal in the art room or dark room. My hands have always needed to make something.

But for years—decades, really—I drew in private. For myself. For my sanity. A secret practice that lived in sketchbooks I'd shove in cupboards or, more often, throw in the bin.

Because that quiet voice was loud: Not good enough. Not original. Who do you think you are?

I dreamed of being an artist, but I couldn't imagine anyone actually wanting what I made. So I kept it hidden. Safe from judgment, but also safe from possibility.

The shift didn't happen all at once. It was slow—an accumulation of people who saw something in me I couldn't see yet.

My surgeon, after my recent round of radiation, telling me not to be defined by my diagnosis but by what I wanted my life to be. Friends who kept asking to see my work, who wouldn't let me deflect with "oh, it's nothing." My husband, nine months ago, when I moved into the tiniest studio at Studio & Co. and immediately wanted to hide everything under the table—physically pushing me to hang it on the walls instead.

And my circle of women. The ones who didn't wait for me to feel ready. They just said try and held space for whatever happened next.

So I did. I hung the work. I let strangers see it.

And here's the thing nobody tells you about coming out of the creative closet: the response is humbling in ways you can't prepare for.

People loved it. People bought it. But more than that—they wanted to talk. Heart-led, vulnerable conversations with strangers who turned out to be kindred spirits. People in their own seasons of transformation who saw something in the work that reflected what they were living through.

It's some kind of magic, honestly.

And I realized: my people aren't the ones who waited for me to be polished or successful or "ready." They're the ones who saw me mid-mess and said yes, this, keep going.

They're the ones who challenged me. Who sat with me in the hard stuff. Who showed up unannounced with coffee or a text that said "how's the work going?" when they knew I needed to hear it. Who called me out when I tried to shrink back into hiding.

They didn't need me to have it figured out. They just needed me to keep showing up.

And now, on the other side of the studio table, I get to be that person for others. The woman who commissions a piece because she's in her own season of becoming. The stranger at a workshop who admits she's terrified but came anyway. The person who messages to say the work made them feel less alone.

That's what finding your people actually looks like. Not a polished tribe of like-minded souls who all have it together. But the messy, brave ones who see you where you are—unfinished, uncertain, still unfolding—and love you there. They don't wait for your "after" to show up. They're already here, in the middle of the mess holding safe space.