The year was 2020.

The world was coming off the deaths of many celebrities and the garbage fires of the previous four years (2016–2019 inclusive) with the grand hope that a year with repeat numbers somehow signalled quality.

Our Nostradamus-like proclivity proved false, and we were hit with a global pandemic that flipped the world upside down in the blink of an eye—never to return to its former, illusory self.

Also, I turned 30 and started learning to live life on my own terms.

At the very beginning of the pandemic - before I turned 30 - I was sitting in an apartment I hated, in a city I hadn’t truly enjoyed in over a decade, feeling stuck. Before the pandemic, my “career” was floundering, or more accurately, bloated and unfocused. I had accumulated a variety of related experiences - hoping they’d eventually scaffold me toward the dream of creating and selling something beautiful - but instead I had constructed a kind of beautiful prison.

My city, my apartment, my life from the outside looked curated, even enviable. But it wasn’t mine. I was living a life shaped by fear and compliance. I was waiting for someone - anyone - to show me how to live, all while knowing deep down that no one ever would.

I was a painter who never painted, a fashion designer who didn’t make clothes, a writer who - well, okay - I had been writing the year before. Maybe that’s why I had the courage to quit my newly acquired job in the financial industry (my eyes roll so hard thinking about it, I can see into my childhood).

I lost my voice - literally - within days of finishing training. Then promptly fell ill for a week. Laying in bed, I stared at the ceiling and realized just how violently allergic I was to that life. The windowless North York office. The headset. The dead fluorescent light. The silent panic. I returned just once, to hand in my fob and laptop, and walked out promising myself I was never going back to a 9–5; not ever again.

By March 2021, I sold everything I could, put the rest in storage, and told my partner to do the same. He hated his job, too - was burnt out and cynical. I organized a nearly four-month sabbatical, first to BC and the Sunshine Coast, then to Europe. We lived off savings, cheap coffee, and the good faith of spontaneity. I took photos, wrote, wandered, swam, rested. We came back once the cold set in, totally burnt out on baby Jesuses and long-haul transportation, but buzzed from sunlit stone buildings and good bread.

In 2022, I returned to school to finish what I had once abandoned; not to prove anything to anyone, but to close a chapter with clarity and open the next with intention. I wasn’t just an artist anymore - I was a builder of my own world. One stitched from shadow and thread, memory and gesture, poetry and pigment. I completed the final year and graduated, finally, with a Bachelor of Design. It felt… oddly easy. Not because the work was simple, but because I had finally stopped resisting myself.

And that’s when things began to really shift.

I saw my life differently. The patchwork of jobs, identities, interests - all the versions of me I had performed - suddenly looked like raw material, not failure. I began pulling at the threads that no longer served me. What unraveled wasn’t a breakdown. It was an emergence.

I dyed fabric with plants I foraged. I walked for hours, tracing the way shadow clung to scaffolding or how light slipped between buildings at dusk. I stopped seeing the city as a trap, and started seeing it as material; something I could repurpose.

By 2023, I had my first solo show. Then another. I built installations out of thread and silence. I painted with clarity. I made a performance piece from stillness and longing. People began to see the thread that I had always sensed - but couldn’t quite articulate - was running through everything I made.

I’m not “there” yet. But I’m rooted now. Clear-eyed and callused, still soft. I’ve built a life with scaffolding of my own making - one that holds, even as it transforms.

And maybe that’s what art is, really: not an escape from life, but a way to rework it. A method of survival that makes beauty from constraint. A practice of remembering that I was never lost - I was just unstitched, waiting to be remade.