I have been taking an accidental hiatus: from writing (I’m sorry!), from answering emails (I’m sorry!), from dialing out to talk to family members on the phone (also sorry!). It is easy to get overwhelmed. Sometimes I imagine that I do not have a cell phone. In July 2023, I left instagram and I haven’t been back. For a while, I fell into scrolling on other apps: on reddit (deleted) and pinterest (which became boring after the algorithm started catering specifically to lesson planning). Now, I don’t scroll. But I do stare at the screen. I will it to give me something new. I stare at my empty email inbox. I stare at the same five aggregated news article headlines in Ground News without clicking on them. 

At the very end of March, I took on a month-long gig at my partner’s high school, stepping in for an art teacher who has been out on leave. Before me, they’d had a sub without a background in art. I had to start from scratch with them, even temporarily. Trial by fire, my temporary supervisor called it, and then they liked what I was doing enough to pay me overtime to write a unit for the next substitute. This experience took up all of my brain space. I couldn’t look at my cell phone without becoming overwhelmed. I couldn’t look at pinterest without searching assessments assessments assessments or any other webpage without replacing it with the search results to “which style of pants will teenagers find cool if a millennial wears them.”

I was reminded of when I do my best, emotionally. It’s when I have no choice but to keep doing and doing and doing. It’s when my days have tired me out and when I get home I have no time to second guess myself. When I was unemployed, I was making the most art of my life. But now, I am finding that I am making deliciously ugly never-show-a-soul art. My students dwelled in this space, where they had goals and enthusiasm, but not skills. They made assemblage sculptures that most other teachers would turn their noses up at, but not me. I love ugly art, where it comes from the idea first, and where the aesthetics come next or later or never at all. 

Ugly art is where I relax. Ugly art is where I fuck up and look back at it in a month and realize, “Oh shit, I’m literally a genius.” And also ugly art is something that I can sporadically come back to in between relaxing. I am relearning to loosen up.