Have you been working too hard, or just too much, like all the time—WORKING? Maybe some of you reading here are a lot like me, and we LOVE work and working. Or we convince ourselves that we do and use work as an escape from other things we might not want to face because work is unquestionably GOOD.

A few weeks ago, I archived all but one of the posts on my public Instagram feed. I enjoy using Instagram as a fun way to share life stuff with people I personally know and follow along with those peoples’ lives in turn, but when I made my original Instagram account private and set up a public account for my work, things got pretty overwhelming pretty fast.

So, I’ve been gradually re-engaging with the IRL art world. For a while, it seemed like maybe something new was taking shape; not a revolution, but a revision of the standard formats we were all familiar with before Covid, and it seemed pretty consistent and reliable. I liked it. Lately, though, when I go out, things seem pretty chaotic.

Over the years, I’ve become more curious about my Ukrainian ancestry. Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine has stirred something fundamental in me, stoking a latent pride that I didn’t know was there and connecting me not only to the struggle of a nation’s people fighting to retain their freedom but to a human insistence on liberty that I believe exists within all of us.