Originally published on Substack on July 8, 2025
It's early July and, in Stockholm, the summer has started, but just barely. The heat comes and goes intermittently, sunbursts followed by rain and wind.
Recently, I went for coffee with a friend and artist and ceramicist whose work I admire. We sat streetside at a café, and I savoured my first iced drink of the year. After catching up, we found ourselves entering a familiar spiral—one I imagine many of you may also have experienced lately:
Why create when the world is on fire?
Does making art matter in the face of all the suffering and uncertainty?
Why keep doing it? What’s the point?
These questions have been my companions over the past year and a half—a stretch of time that, incredibly, marks how long it's been since I last wrote to you. In that time, the world has kept spinning, global uncertainty has stacked up like sediment, and I have continued making, quietly and tentatively, even when it has felt murky, slow, and at times even pointless.
The past eighteen months have been filled with change: In 2024, I was awarded generous artist grants, including a year-long working grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, which allowed me to step back from my commercial illustration work and recommit to my personal art practice. I've shown work in London, New York, and Minneapolis. This past January, I began an intensive year-long programme at the Royal Drawing School in London, where I've also been spending more time lately. I've worked slowly, consistently, with new attention to material and pace. I also moved into a much larger, brighter studio space last summer, which has allowed me to focus on painting, drawing, and printmaking at a more ambitious scale.
During this time, despite the increased financial pressure that came with stepping back from commercial work, despite many inquiries, and despite having work ready, I didn't reopen my store or make my artwork available for sale.
As someone living with more than one psychiatric diagnosis, including ADHD, I've spent considerable time grappling with the invisible frictions of simply trying to share my work. My mind often feels like an obstacle course, filled with imagined crises and spirals of overthinking that make every decision feel heavier than it needs to be.
Against the backdrop of very real and seemingly constant global crises, my neurodivergent brain did what it thought would keep me safe: it latched onto the notion that being visible was a risk. This wasn't helped by the unpredictability of social media algorithms, or the fact that witnessing so much suffering in real-time can make everything else feel meaningless and even self-indulgent. Weeks turned into months, then into years, and still I kept putting off making my work available for sale. I’ve had similar struggles with keeping up this newsletter.
I began writing these notes as a way to document art-making—not just finished work, but the quiet, messy, in-progress parts, too. At some point, though, perfectionism and fear crept in. Fear of taking up space when so many other more important things are happening. Fear of messing up. Fear of being seen (and of being seen trying).
Maintaining a creative practice while navigating executive dysfunction, sensory overload, and the wider grief of the world often feels like more than I can hold. But lately, thanks in part to exposure and response prevention therapy, I've been retraining my brain to understand that uncertainty doesn't always mean danger. I'm reminding myself that art isn't superfluous—it may be the most human act there is, which matters when our humanity is needed more than ever.
To create in the face of fear, and to allow yourself to be seen while trying, is an act of courageous vulnerability. And, for me, being an artist is as much a practice of vulnerability as it is a practice of craft.
These days, it's easy to forget we're looking at real people through our screens. We're quicker to judge, quicker to dismiss, quicker to reduce complex humans to single snapshots. At the same time, we're nudged toward suspicion and division, beckoned toward working more, buying more, numbing out, scrolling endlessly, and connecting less and less in any substantial way. But our humanity is woven together, and so recognizing ourselves in others becomes both harder and more essential.
In this climate, vulnerability isn't just necessary, it is a way back to intimacy—with ourselves and with each other. I invite you to pick up this thread of vulnerability with me, however small the gesture, and in whatever way makes sense for you and your circumstances. It's through these acts, multiplied across lives and continents, that we begin to stitch a torn world back together.
I’m still reading and re-reading things too many times, compulsively, before sending them. I’m still hesitating to share things on Instagram for fear they won’t be seen. But I’ll pause when I notice that fear, put a hand on my chest or my belly, and take a few deep breaths. I’ll thank the fear for trying to protect me, and gently prepare to do the thing regardless. And so it goes, gradually, tentatively, until, finally, I hit send.