Not because I was lazy or unambitious. Anyone who knew me then would laugh at that. Throughout school and work, I was always ahead. But I also ate every meal sitting down. I kept the home. I hosted dinner parties. I cooked elaborate meals inspired by whatever we had eaten on our last trip somewhere, standing in my kitchen trying to recreate a dish from memory because I could not stop thinking about it. I journaled daily. I did yoga every other day. I went to the gym regularly. I did my nails every two weeks. I called my friends and just sat there while I did it, not multitasking, just talking.

Corporate Annie had work life balance because the structure enforced it. There was a clock in and a clock out. There was a ceiling on what one person could reasonably be expected to do. My coworkers would think I’m insane if I was working all weekend, voluntarily. And there was, crucially, a manager to notify when things were too much and I “didn’t have enough bandwidth”. Then they’d fix it, take things off my plate, re-prioritize projects, and make things feel managable again.

What I did not know then was that the structure itself was the thing I would need to rebuild from scratch.

But underneath all of that, underneath the engineering degree and the corporate job and the responsible choices, there was another version of me. One I had been carrying quietly for a long time.

The artist.

She knew what she was before anyone gave her permission to be it. She knew it in the brief semester at Fashion Institute of Technology, right before pivoting back to engineering and not doing anything with that certificate, because engineering paid, and whatever unknowns laid ahead of actually pursuing something in fashion was not worth the stability I had earned. She knew it every time she sat in a corporate meeting speaking in language that made her cringe, working on someone else’s projects on someone else’s timeline, performing a version of herself she did not recognize. She never stopped knowing. She just learned to carry it quietly, practically, responsibly, the way you carry something precious when the world has not yet told you it is allowed to take up space.

But when she started building Pooterie, and taking a chance on that side of her, it proved to be everything she ever dreamed of; even though she works harder at this than she ever worked in corporate America, even though the hours are longer and the uncertainty is real and there is no one else to hand anything to. She feels a sense of autonomy and responsibility she has never felt before.

And it almost buried her in the process.

It started the way most things that take over your life do. Slowly and then all at once.

I posted my first Instagram post at the end of November. For the first couple of months I averaged one or two posts a week and hovered around fifty followers. Friends. Family. Any random person I could convince to follow me by saying “oh by the way, I’m on Instagram, here it is.” The stakes felt low. This dream still felt far out of reach and I sometimes even felt silly chasing it.

Then in the middle of January, after the dust of the holiday season settled, something in me switched on. I decided I was going to take this seriously because it was my life and it was something I always wanted to do and yes I took the first step of leaving corporate America but so what? I needed to do more than that.

So I started posting every single day. Two weeks later I hit a hundred followers. Three weeks after that, two hundred. And I remember the feeling exactly.

This is working. All I have to do is keep going.

So I kept going.

By the end of February I had made a decision. Ten thousand followers by my birthday, May first. I had less than two hundred at that point. And just a little over two months, to multiply that by fifty. And I knew, in the way you know things when you have spent your whole life proving them to yourself, that I could do it if I just did not stop.

So I did not stop.

In the following months, I was either at the studio making pieces or I was at home making content. Planning, filming, editing, posting, engaging. Every single day. My husband would fall asleep on the couch around ten while I kept working. I would wake him at midnight and we would go to bed and the last thing I thought before I fell asleep was what I needed to do tomorrow. The first thing I did every morning was reach for my phone and pick up exactly where I had left off the night before. My husband would wake up and leave for work, and I would stay in bed for an hour, sometimes more, just continuing. Not starting the day. Just continuing.

I would park my car and sit in it for an hour before I could go inside. I would walk through the front door and not even take off my shoes, just sit down right there, on the bench meant for a brief moment of putting on shoes, and keep going for another hour until my back was sore and my legs grew tired. Transitioning between tasks became almost impossible. If I was already doing something, getting up to make dinner or move the laundry from the wash to the dryer felt like a cost I could not justify. Everything else started slipping out of my grasp. The home. The meals. The journals I used to fill every single day. The self care routines. The nails. The friends I had not properly spoken to in weeks.

In the depths of winter I regularly went two days without showering more than once. It was cold. I was not sweating. I told myself it was fine.

It was not fine. But it was working, and the working kept paying out, more website visits, more orders, more opportunities, more acknowledgement of my work, so I kept going.

One Saturday morning we had a date planned. I was making content and I knew I needed to finish before we left. My husband looked over and asked if he could help.

I sat there for a brief second trying to figure out how to answer that.

He could not edit the video. He could not do the voiceover. He could not write the caption or post it or know which audio to use or understand why any of it mattered. There was nothing to hand off. Every single task existed inside my head and could only be executed by me.

I told him thank you but I was okay, and kept working.

He waited, did something else, and tried his best to stay out of my way while I felt terribly about it. And when I was ready, we left. But once we were out I was actually present. I was good at that, drawing a clear line between his time and work time, because I did not want to let him down.

It was apparently okay to let myself down.

That asymmetry sat with me for a long time before I understood what it meant. I had the boundary for him. I did not have it for me. His presence was the only thing enforcing the clock out. And when he was traveling, when there was no one sitting on the couch waiting for me to finish, there was no one left to protect me from myself.

He kept trying to find ways to help even when I could not tell him how. I would not understand until much later that he already was.

Around this time I sent a friend a series of desperate texts, when all she did was ask me about how I’ve been:

I sent it as a justification and a “I feel so bad please don’t ask me that again” and went to the studio.

The friends piece is more complicated than it looks.

I did not resent my friends. I missed them. Part of me always looked forward to seeing them, the part that remembered what it felt like to just sit with someone and catch up and laugh and be a person who was not also running a business. But there was another part, quieter and more ashamed, that felt something tighten when a plan got made. Not because I did not want to go. Because every spare moment I had was going to either the business or the people I loved, and none of it was going back to me.

I kept pouring anyway. Out of love, out of obligation, out of knowing that seeing them would fill me up a little even if it could not fill me up completely. And it did, every time. But the thing that would fill me up completely was time I was not giving myself. The self care. The journals. The elaborate routines. The quiet mornings that used to belong to me.

The truth I could not quite say out loud was this. If I had not gone to see my friends, I would not have used that time for myself. I would have worked. So the resentment was never really about them. It was about never having anything left. About pouring from a cup that was never getting refilled.

My birthday made all of this impossible to ignore.

My husband had been asking all weekend what I wanted to do. I told him 26 was nothing special. What I meant was “please do not add anything else to this week. I want to work. I have a new drop to post and manage, a sale at my studio to prep and set up for, and more content to make”.

Instead, my sister planned with him to surprise me. She took a four hour bus ride from NYC to Boston, after work, and showed up at the Mudflat spring sale, just wandering through the aisles. When I caught sight of her, I marched straight over before I knew what my body was doing. “I know you!” I said, pointing right in her face, the way you’d imagine in comics, “what are you doing here!?”

A whole jumble of things at once. Surprise. Joy. Love. And then, almost immediately, the logistics. Where is she staying. How long is she here. What is expected of me.

I had not planned for this. I had not planned to give anyone other than my husband, who was used to me working, my weekend.

But the next day, we walked through the Harvard Arboretum in the drizzle, the very typical drizzle of a Boston spring. We had brunch. We got boba and dessert. My husband drove us around all day. We had dinner with my cousin. All my favorite people. All my favorite foods. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, walking through wet grass with my sister and my husband, I felt something release.

The work was still there. It would be there Monday. Nothing was so pressing. Having my own business meant I set my own deadlines. I set my own goals. And it was all okay.

My sister did not know she was teaching me something that day. She just showed up because she loves me. And the cup that I thought was too empty to give from turned out to have more in it than I knew.

Here is what I did not understand yet. I was not just building a business.

I left corporate America knowing what I was leaving. The performing. The corporate speak. The work that belonged to someone else’s vision on someone else’s timeline. What I did not understand was what I was bringing with me.

The belief that rest is something you earn. That your value lives in your output. That the moment you let go, even briefly, something gets lost that cannot be recovered.

I was not escaping the cage. I was rebuilding it, mine this time, in a prettier room. And I did not see it until I became the worst boss I have ever had.

No manager, no corporate ladder, no demanding client has ever pushed me the way I pushed myself in those five months. At least in corporate America I could point at someone else.

This time there was no one to point at.

I built the cage myself, bar by bar, and called it passion the whole time. Because passion is a word that makes overworking sound noble.

What I did not lose was the love.

I want to be clear about that because it would be easy to read all of this as a story about a dream that consumed itself. It was not. It is not.

The studio is the one place where none of it follows me in. I forget my phone. I forget my obligations. I forget the content calendar and the DMs and the to do list that never fully empties. Sometimes I forget to eat. I am working on that. But in the studio, with my hands in the clay, I am more myself than I am anywhere else. That has never changed. That was always the point.

And the truth is, I think some of what I am describing is just what the beginning of something requires. A friend told me once that starting a business is like having a newborn. Of course the baby gets everything. Of course you lose sleep. Of course the rest of your life goes on hold for a while. That is not dysfunction. That is devotion. That is what it looks like to bring something new into the world and refuse to let it die.

Pooterie was in its infant season. I gave it everything an infant needs. And somewhere along the way I forgot that even the most devoted mother has to take care of herself too. Not despite the baby. For the baby.

So. The big goal of ten thousand followers.

The count started slowing around eight thousand, about a week before my birthday. I kept going. I made content that came from somewhere honest, things I was actually feeling, things I was actually going through. And people responded.

I woke up one morning, after checking the number, turned over, and told my husband: “it is going to happen today!”

We were both so excited and just waited. I’m not sure if he texted me first or if I did, but in the middle of the work day, it happened.

Ten thousand followers.

I expected to feel unstoppable. The starting gun for whatever came next. Ready for the next mountain.

Instead, my whole body relaxed.

Not the reaction I saw coming. But the moment it happened it made complete sense. And it had nothing to do with the algorithm or the reach or what brands might notice now or what doors five digits might open.

It was about the artist.

The one who knew she was an artist long before anyone gave her permission to be it. The one who set that part of herself aside for years, practically, responsibly, because engineering paid and art was a risk and there were people watching who needed her to make the safe choice. The one who spent years in corporate meetings and never stopped knowing, quietly, that she was supposed to be making things with her hands.

That version of me had never had an audience. Had never had strangers in cities she had never been to find her work and stay. Had never had proof that the thing she was, underneath everything else she had learned to be, was worth something to anyone besides herself.

There is a particular grief that comes with being a creative person who spent years in a world that did not have room for that part of you. Not because anyone was cruel. Just because the practical version of your life kept winning. The engineering degree. The corporate job. The stable life. The predictable finances. The responsible choice, made again and again, while the artist waited.

She was very patient. She waited a long time.

And then ten thousand strangers showed up and said we see her. We are glad she is here.

Ten thousand was not just a vanity metric. It was the first time the artist had the same permission to be here as the engineer. The same proof of value. The same right to take up space.

I did not think I would get there so fast. I did not think, when I started, that people would care this much, or at all. I just needed to show up long enough to find out. I needed to see it with my own eyes before I could let myself believe it was real.

And then I saw it.

And I finally exhaled.

But arrival did not close the loop the way I thought it would.

Because now I knew I could push to twenty thousand. Fifty. A hundred. I know exactly what that takes. I also know exactly what it costs. And for the first time I had to actually decide whether I was willing to pay it again.

I was not.

Not because I had given up. Because I had arrived. And arriving is the moment you finally get to choose what kind of builder you want to be. Not the kind who proves herself by how long she can go without stopping. The kind who builds something sustainable enough to last.

I do not want to put my worth in a number anymore. It still matters, for reasons that has more to do with just vanity. But mainly because I got what I needed from it. And now I get to build differently.

It is summer now. And I am trying.

Not in the abstract way I used to write it in my intentions every week, that hollow sincerity of move your body more, be present, rest, written down and immediately buried under everything else. In a concrete, specific, this is actually happening way.

My husband asked me once why I did not treat content creation like a 9 to 5 and studio time like a hobby. Something about the reframe clicked. Now Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I am at the studio. Tuesday and Thursday I am home for laundry, meal prep, errands, and content creation. Evenings and weekends are usually free to be present with my friends and family, although some studio days melt into studio nights. It is not perfect. Some days bleed into each other. But the structure exists, and structure is what corporate Annie had that Pooterie Annie was desperately missing.

My friend, the one I sent that text to, told me not to think about Pooterie in the first hour of being awake or the last hour before sleep. Again, I am not perfect at it, but I get out of bed before I check my phone now. I don’t quite make it to an hour, but I do get my day started before doing anything Pooterie related. I am more intentional before bed too, most nights. These two small guidelines have made more difference than I expected.

Tomorrow I leave for a sailing trip with friends. I am in charge of provisioning and I have been slowly working on it between everything else, which is its own kind of progress. My sister is coming back to Boston in a couple of weeks. A friend is visiting at the end of July. In August, my husband and I celebrate one year of marriage and we are taking a trip to Japan, visiting family in China, and ending it in Sydney where he will run the Sydney marathon. We are planning a summer cookout in the new apartment. More girls craft nights. More date nights. More hiking.

More of the Annie who existed before Pooterie, except now she comes with Pooterie, and that feels like the right order of things.

The balance is hard to find. I am not going to pretend otherwise. There are still evenings where I look up and realize I have been working for six hours and forgot to eat. Still mornings where the phone wins before I am fully awake, but only for 30 minutes this time, not an hour and a half. Still moments where the cup feels empty and I am pouring from it anyway.

But the plans are real. The structure is real. The direction is clear even when the execution is messy.

And for someone who spent years running toward the wrong finish line, knowing the right direction at all is everything.

I am still figuring this out. Some weeks I post every day still. Other weeks just once. I used to think on and off meant I was failing. Now I think on and off might just be what it actually looks like to build something while also living a life.

But I know what the cage looks like now. From the inside. And I know I am the one holding the key.

The whole point of building this life was to actually live it.

Not to trade one set of impossible standards for another and call it freedom. Not to become the worst boss I have ever had and call it following my passion. Studio days and home days. First hour and last hour. A husband who reframes things quietly until they click. A friend who texts back with the exact support you needed. The cage does not unlock itself. But it turns out you do not have to unlock it alone.

The point was the dinner party. The elaborate homemade meal. The drizzly walk through the arboretum with the people you love most. The artist who waited so long to be seen, finally being seen, and then being given something even better than an audience.

Being given the life she’s always dreamed of living.

She was just running toward the wrong finish line for a long time.

And now that she found the right one, she is learning to stay.

It was 10 PM the night before my first ever market. I was alone in my apartment, unpacked boxes being ignored around me, ink on my hands, making linocut prints, a process I had learned that week. I still had to do a mock setup of my table, had not packed my pieces, had not figured out how I was going to carry everything to the car by myself as my husband was traveling. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I picked up my phone to text my friend June and tell her I was not going to make it.

But I did not send it.

I gave myself one year. One year to find out if leaving a corporate engineering career to make pottery full-time was brave or just reckless. If it was what I was meant to do or if I’m just taking a creative sabbatical. It is June now. The halfway mark. And the honest, unglamorous truth is that I already know what is waiting on the other side of this year if the numbers do not start making sense. I left five years of performing a version of myself I did not recognize, speaking in language that made me cringe (sorporate-speak), working on someone else’s terms, on someone else’s timeline, on someone else’s projects that I did not fully believe in, asking permission to take time off because the company owned my time. In six months, I might have to truly start looking for jobs again and opt back into that life if I can’t justify being an artist.

But in the meantime, this May, I went to Copenhagen on a week’s notice because the opportunity came up and I was able to say yes. Being able to say yes to all of life’s beautiful whims is the biggest reason I left. Going back means going back to asking someone else for permission to live my life.

Six months in, I have almost 13,000 followers on Instagram and 7,000 on Facebook. Two nearly sold-out drops. A sold-out in-person workshop. In-store partnerships. Over two hundred pieces in your homes all over the country. And there has always been a lurking voice underneath all of it with an explanation for every single one. Algorithm. Fluke. Beginner’s luck. Not yet. Not enough. Not real.

My first in-person market was the one test that voice could not explain away before it happened. And I almost did not go.

What stopped me was one sentence I have told myself my whole life, every time I was about to retreat:

It has never turned out as bad as you imagined. Not once. Not ever.

So I finished the prints. I did a mock setup, packed my pieces carefully in padding, and packed the car alone. On the way to the market I picked up fresh flowers for my new vases and stopped at a Facebook Marketplace pickup for a rolling cart I knew would come in handy. It ended up becoming an extension of my table and the thing that made carrying everything from car to booth actually manageable. I showed up.

And June was already there, tent up, table ready, exactly as she said she would be. She had invited me to share her booth at Hong Kong Fest, a festival celebrating the culture we both carry, four weeks before, when I had no time to make new work and no market experience and no tent and no table and every practical reason to say no. She solved every practical reason. Lent me the tent, split the fee, told me that watching someone hold your work in person is something you cannot get online and that I needed to find that out for myself.

She was right. But I did not know that yet.

For the first three hours it was everything I had hoped; warm people, real conversations, strangers picking up my pieces with both hands, and strangers becoming real connections. No one said it was too expensive. No one said it was ugly. Every fear I had carried for a month dissolved on contact with reality, the way those fears always do.

And then at two PM I reached under the table for a piece to fill a gap in my display and pulled out the last one I had in my box of extras. I swam my hands around the box, brushing away the paper padding and felt all four corners of the box. It was the last one.

I looked at my table. I looked at the crowd still moving through the tent. Three hours left.

This is going to work.

An hour later, a woman walked past my booth and lingered. She had never heard of me. Was not following me online, did not know anything about what I make or why I make it. Just a stranger at a festival who paused. I asked what she drank in the mornings and because she mentioned she made coffee in a machine at home, I showed her the pour-over dripper first. I walked her through what this was instead. No electricity. No wires. No plugs. Just the handmade ceramic dripper, a filter, coffee grounds, hot water, and however long you decide to give it. Then I showed her the matcha mug, the way the tea strainer sits inside it, the way the same vessel works as a matcha bowl. And the saucer, which catches the drips from the dripper, holds the mug snug, doubles as a lid, works as a snack plate. I told her what I tell everyone: think about how much of your day revolves around a cup of something. Water. Coffee. Tea. Something comforting, something nourishing, something that marks the beginning or the end of something else. It is all built around the cup. She listened. She asked questions. And then she bought a full ritual set for herself and another one to give to a friend.

She did not buy it because of an algorithm. She bought it because I was standing there sharing my passion about something I love and made with my hands she felt it and wanted to be a part of that story.

This is going to work.

From 11 AM to 5 PM I did not sit down once. Barely ate. And, TMI but, went to the bathroom once. My husband showed up at some point with food from the vendors because he knew I would not stop to eat. I did not really have time to eat it, I was too busy talking to you guys! When I finally packed the car at the end of the day and looked at my transactions for the first time, I saw a four-figure number. My first market. In the on and off wind and rain. With work I already had and prints I had made the night before.

The four-figure number did not make me believe it, though. Numbers are abstract. The lurking voice has outlasted bigger evidence than that.

What finally closed the gap was the near-empty table.

The display stands with only a few pieces left on them. The boxes underneath with nothing left in them. Standing there exhausted, not having eaten, looking at what used to be full. Two trips to set up became one light trip out. There is no explaining that away. No algorithm responsible for it. People saw my work in person, saw the way I showed up for it and proudly explained every piece. That is just true.

This is going to work.

The first time I believed it, that I can do this, that I can make it as a full-time artist - there was nothing left to sell.

I cried in the car. The good kind. The next morning I woke up and the believing did not make things simpler. It made the problem visible.

May was my biggest month ever. The Homecoming Collection drop, the sold-out Mother’s Day workshop, this market, hitting 10,000 followers at the start of the month; I matched what I used to make in a month of corporate engineering. With two weeks of vacation in the middle of it and only eight studio days. Eight.

But I cannot replicate May every month. No workshop every month. No drop every month. No market every month. And even if I could, I cannot make enough work because I am working out of a two-by-two-by-two cubby in a shared studio with four hundred other artists, on whatever wheel happens to be open, only during the hours the studio allows, with four twelve-inch bats and ten seven-inch bats and shelves I share with everyone else who needs space for their work. The ceiling on Pooterie right now is the size of that shelf.

I knew this was coming. So I applied for the Mudflat Artist-in-Residence, a full year in the studio, a real body of work, the kind of space that would let Pooterie become what I can already see it becoming. This was a highly competitive program open to artists across the country and the application was due in two days when I finally decided I was an artist enough to apply for it, and also when I realized I needed references. I asked Rachael, the owner of The Hermit on Green Street, one of the shops that carries my work; we had known each other for barely a month. I asked Doug, the pottery teacher I had spent the last semester with. Both of them said yes. Both of them wrote something real on two days notice for someone still early enough in her practice that she almost did not think she was allowed to apply.

I did not get the residency.

I also applied for a studio rental space at Mudflat. Also competitive. Also something I talked myself out of and then back into at the last moment.

I did not get that either.

Which means there is one door left.

We moved two weeks ago, my husband and I, into a new place. And I left a corner of the office empty because some part of me had a dream that the other parts of me were too shy to admit. That part thought: in this room, what if we built something. A wheel. Shelving. More bats. A wedging table. A water system. A home studio built into the corner of a room, funded by everything Pooterie has made, and it’s not going to take just a portion of it, I’d need all of it, on top of everything already spent on clay, firings, studio tuition, running a business, six months of keeping this alive.

Every other option closed. This is the last one.

Six months left in the year I gave myself. One corner of a room. Everything I have earned so far. On one more bet.

But here is what I know now, after six months of this. My friends saw something in my work before I had an Instagram account and made me start one; I opened it before I even left corporate and did not post anything for eight months. My husband has held this whole thing steady while I worked through the self-doubt and figured out if it could work. Rachael said yes on two days notice. Doug said yes on two days notice. June lent me a tent and a table and told me I needed to find out what it felt like to watch someone hold my work in person. A stranger at a market bought two ritual sets because I was standing there sharing my passion for my work and the craft. Thousands of people have been showing up online, quietly and loudly, every time I post something. Two hundred studio newsletter subscribers who found their way there and stayed. And almost a hundred orders on my website from people who found a piece to bring home.

I have not been doing this alone. There was always someone there cheering me on whenever I kept showing up long enough to see it.

The lurking voice had an explanation for every success. It never had an explanation for the people.

The home studio is the next chapter. Since I’m going to be a full-time artist now … no really, this time for reals. I wonder what I can achieve when i finally start taking myself and Pooterie seriously.

I am going to document every part of building it; the unglamorous parts, the terrifying parts, the parts where the voice gets loud and I show up anyway.

If you want to follow along; my work, my process, what comes next, follow over on Instagram and join my studio newsletter. ❤️

Just know: it almost did not exist.

And I am really glad I did not send that text.

If you have not read that one yet, I would start there. This is what came next.

I am lying on my friend’s couch in Austin, Texas, and I am thinking about my Instagram analytics.

It is day two of my first real break in 5 months. The studio is closed. My flight here was the permission slip I could not write myself. And still, here I am, horizontal, sun coming through someone else’s windows, wondering if I am losing traction.

This is what rest looks like when you have not given yourself permission to actually have it.

I left Boston entirely because I knew if I stayed, I would find something to do. The studio is closed this week, and I can tell you with complete honesty that if it were not, I would have gone in. And if I was home, there is packing for a move that is not just a move but an inventory of everything I own and a decision about what deserves to come with me. There is moving prep and a studio corner in my office that I have been ignoring for months and my first in-person workshop I have not fully prepared for and a new collection launching on my birthday and a content calendar that does not pause because I am tired and DMs I feel guilty about every time I see the notification and friends I owe calls to and family I keep meaning to check in with and laundry and plants and dinner and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

There is always something. There will always be something.

I had to manufacture the distance to actually stop. Nobody warned me that the hardest part of building something you love is learning to put it down.

There is a guilt that comes with rest when you are building something from scratch, and it runs in both directions.

There is the guilt of knowing you need to rest and not letting yourself. And then there is the guilt that shows up once you actually do stop. A persistent whisper of I should be doing something that follows you into the stillness and makes the rest feel hollow. Like you are doing it wrong. Like you are falling behind in real time.

I have been lying on my friend’s couch, cuddling with her sweet puppy in Austin, wondering if I am losing traction. On day two.

Here is the reframe I keep coming back to.

Rest is not stressful. Resting while believing you should be working is stressful. The problem is not the stopping.

The problem is that you have not given yourself permission to be here, fully here, so you are half resting, half monitoring, and getting the benefits of neither.

Presence is the whole thing. And presence is exactly what the pace of building a business quietly trains you out of.

Burnout is not the problem. The problem is that we have normalized treating ourselves as the last line item.

There is a fear underneath all of this that I do not think we say out loud enough. Actually, there are several.

The fear that the algorithm does not wait. That while you are resting, it just finds someone else to fill your slot. And sometimes, that is not paranoia. That is actually what happens.

The fear that if you are not visible, you are forgettable. And you worked too hard to be forgettable.

The fear that rest means you are not serious about this. That the version of you who broke ground to get here would be disappointed. That slowing down confirms something you are not ready to say out loud.

The fear that you might lose more by resting than you could possibly gain.

The fear that someone else in your space is posting right now, today, while you are sitting still. And that is the ground you just gave up.

The fear that your audience will realize they do not actually miss you.

The fear that you will come back and have to start over.

The fear that caring about rest means you do not care enough about the work.

The fear that momentum is fragile and you are the only one holding it. And the moment you let go, even briefly, it dissolves.

Those fears are real. I am not going to tell you they are irrational.

But there is a version of hustle culture that has convinced us that success is just a matter of how long you can bully yourself before you break.

That if you push hard enough, long enough, deprive yourself consistently enough, you will eventually arrive somewhere worth arriving. And I have started to think that if you spend long enough chasing, you never learn how to land. When you finally get there, whatever there looks like for you, you will not know how to be still. You will just find a new thing to chase, because stillness will have become unbearable.

That is not freedom. That is just a different kind of cage.

I left a corporate career to build this. Not to replicate the same burnout in a more aesthetic setting. The whole point was time. Autonomy. The ability to decide what my days look like, to make things with my hands and have that be enough to sustain a life. That was the original reason. And it gets so easy to lose sight of it when you are in the middle of a drop week, when everything needs you at once.

Here is what I know:

You are the number one asset in your business. Your creativity, your energy, your presence, the quality of what you make and what you offer. It all comes from you. And you are also the first thing that gets abandoned when everything else needs attention.

You cannot make from empty. You cannot pour from a cup you never refilled.

When I actually rest, when I let myself be somewhere without an agenda, I come back with more. More energy, better work, a clearer sense of why I am doing any of this. Not because rest is magic, but because I am better when I am whole. And my work is better too.

This is me processing out loud. The fact that I wrote two essays and continued posting on Instagram about rest during my rest week is not lost on me. I do not have it figured out. I am still a work in progress.

But I am starting to think the question was never really about rest at all.

It was about something harder. Something I did not have language for until I came home and felt the familiar pull start up again almost immediately. The inbox. The launch. The next thing. And noticed, for the first time, that I could see it coming before it swallowed me whole, again.

That is the next one. Currently living it a bit more before I organize my thoughts around it. I hope you will be here for that one.

I am the maker, the marketer, the customer service line, the everything. I chose this. I love this. And somewhere in the last five months, I quietly fell off my own list.

My husband gave me a new yoga mat a few weeks ago. He was excited about it in the way he gets excited about things he has been thinking about for a while. He held it out and said, “this is for you working so hard on Pooterie”. And I smiled and I thanked him and felt, underneath the gratitude, a specific and uncomfortable guilt. Not because the gift wasn’t thoughtful. Because it was so thoughtful that it hurt a little. He had seen something I had been trying not to look at directly. That the rituals I used to build my days around, the yoga, the journaling, the slow mornings, had quietly disappeared. And he was handing me a way back to them, gently, without making it a conversation.

The guilt was this: I don’t know when I am going to use this. I want to. I intend to. But I could not honestly tell him, or myself, when I would slow down enough to actually get on it.

I unrolled it immediately and left it on the floor. Not because I was ready to use it. Because I knew that if it stayed in the corner, rolled up, it would stay that way. So I put it where I would have to see it. Where I would have to step around it. Where it would ask me, every single day, a question I wasn’t quite ready to answer.

The first time I actually got down on it, I cried, quietly, in the way you cry when you recognize something you have been missing. I have a practice of thanking myself at the end of every yoga session. For showing up. For being there. And I hadn’t done that in so long that saying it again felt like running into an old friend I had let drift.

Oh. I haven’t done this in a while. I haven’t shown up for myself in a while.

The mat had been there the whole time. I just kept stepping around it.

I have been selling a collection called Rituals for the past few months. Mugs designed for slow mornings. Vessels that hold the intention of a life lived deliberately. People are drawn to them because they want that feeling. The unhurried cup of tea. The cohesive cupboard that makes sense. The morning that belongs to them.

The irony is not lost on me.

I used to journal every single day. I had a whole practice. How I was feeling mentally, physically, spiritually. The kind moments, the small ones that disappear if you don’t catch them. A summary of my day. Three things I was grateful for. I did this for years. It was the thing that kept me tethered to myself, the practice of closing the loops that living tends to leave open.

Yet, I haven’t done it in months, a daily ritual became a weekly one.

What replaced it was the business, and I love it so completely that saying yes to it felt like the right thing every single time. I wake up most mornings unable to believe that this is actually my life. That I get to make things with my hands and call it work. That I left the version of myself that was always performing competence and building toward someone else’s vision, and built this instead.

That feeling is real. And it has quietly cost me everything I used to do to stay whole.

I grew up in a family where everything was earned. My parents immigrated here with nothing and built a life through work and sacrifice and an almost cellular belief that rest was something you got to eventually, once you had proven enough. I watched my father run his own business, provide for five of us, never stop. I absorbed that. I finished my engineering degree in three years and my master’s in one, not because I had to, but because I could not stop moving. Getting to the starting line faster felt like the point.

I have never not been grinding. It is not a habit. It is closer to an identity.

And so when I left my corporate job and started building Pooterie, I brought all of that with me. The drive. The discipline. The quiet belief that my value lives in my output. That if I am not producing, I am falling behind. That rest is a reward I have not yet earned.

And the painful truth is that it has worked. It always has. I grew my Instagram from zero followers and zero knowledge of how to even use the app to over 8,000 in under five months. The hustle has been handsomely rewarded, and that is exactly the problem. When the thing that is costing me myself keeps looking like success, it is very hard to argue with it. So you don’t. You just keep going. You write move your body more in your intentions for the fifteenth week in a row, feel good enough about that, and you get back to work.

That is the cycle. And I am only just starting to see it clearly enough to name it.

Nobody told me that the belief itself was the thing I actually needed to leave behind.

A few days ago, I found myself on the StairMaster, phone in hand, replying to DMs, editing a reel, doing the work that never fully stops. And somewhere in the middle of it I caught myself and thought, what am I doing this for? Not rhetorically. But actually. What is this for?

Because even at the gym I could not be present. Even stretching on that yoga mat, the one my husband gave me with so much tenderness, I was working. Even the moments that were supposed to be mine had been absorbed by the business. The StairMaster, the yoga mat, the gym, none of it was actually rest. It was just working from a different location, in a different position.

I have written move your body more in my intentions every single week for five months. And somehow I turned the moving of my body into another form of productivity.

The life I am building toward, the one Pooterie is in service of, has rest in it. It has slow mornings with nowhere to be. It has cooking dinner without rushing. It has my husband on the couch next to me with both of our phones in the other room. It has yoga and journaling and walks and all the things I have quietly set aside while I chased the version of the life that was supposed to make all of that possible.

I have been chasing the life instead of living it.

The rituals I forgot to keep were not casualties of a busy season. They were the first things I should have protected.

Because they were never the reward for doing the work. They were what made the work worth doing.

I will also admit, I wrote this essay on what was supposed to be a rest day. I am not sure I know how to fully separate the making from the living. Maybe that is not the point. Maybe the point is just to notice. To thank yourself for showing up, even when showing up looks different than you planned.

Not real people with real opinions about real things I had actually done. Something vaguer and more persistent than that. A shapeless crowd of observers I could never quite locate or name, but whose imagined judgment had an outsized influence on what I allowed myself to do, say, try, become. I made decisions based on what they might think. I stayed small in certain rooms to avoid their notice. I held back from things I wanted because the risk of failing in front of them felt worse than the certainty of never trying at all.

For a long time I didn’t have a name for this. It was just the water I swam in. The low hum underneath everything.

I think it started in middle school, the way most things that haunt us do. You are thirteen and your identity is barely formed, your prefrontal cortex is still years from completion, and everything feels unbearably high stakes because in some ways it actually is. You are deciding, in real time, who you are going to be, what you stand for, how you want to show up in the world. And that process is so raw and so tender that even the smallest outside noise can knock you off course. I was trying to become someone and I was terrified of anyone watching me do it.

My parents banned me from social media when I was growing up. At the time I accepted it with the resignation of a teenager who has no choice. But looking back I was also, quietly, relieved. Social media would have given the imaginary haters an address. A place to find me, to comment on the life I was still in the middle of figuring out, to weigh in on a version of myself that wasn’t finished yet. Not having it meant I got to develop who I was without outside input from people whose opinions I hadn’t earned the right to care about yet. I got to become someone in private. That turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of my adolescence, even if it didn’t feel like a gift at the time.

But the imaginary haters didn’t disappear when I grew up. They just changed shape.

When I left my engineering career and started building Pooterie, they reappeared in a new form. Boston is not a city that is short on highly successful people. Pretty much everyone I encountered was on some rung of the corporate ladder, working toward the next one, fluent in the language of titles and promotions and five year plans. And I was a ceramicist working out of a shared community studio with three hundred other artists, not yet able to afford my own space, making maybe a hundred pieces a month and not selling all of them. I was terrified of what it would look like to show up in those rooms as that person.

I didn’t want to be seen as the floundering, failing, starving artist. I didn’t want people to patronize me or feel bad for me or make themselves small in the conversation to accommodate what they assumed was my fragility. I wanted to take up the same space they did. I wanted to feel like I deserved to be in the room on equal footing, not as someone’s charity case or cautionary tale. And most of this, I now understand, was entirely in my head. The people in those rooms were not thinking about me the way I imagined. They had their own imaginary audiences to manage.

But that understanding came slowly, and it came through showing up rather than through thinking my way to it.

I had zero personal social media before I started posting about Pooterie. I dragged my feet for over a year to even set up the account, and the reason was exactly what you’d expect: I didn’t want people to see my life and judge how it was panning out. I didn’t want to give the imaginary audience a window. I had spent so many years keeping that window closed and I wasn’t sure I was ready to open it.

But here is what I kept coming back to. The reason I was censoring myself wasn’t because I believed what I was doing was wrong or small or not worth sharing. It was because of people who weren’t even watching. And at some point I had to ask myself a serious question: is failing myself actually better than failing them? Is staying invisible to protect an imaginary audience worth the cost of never finding out what I’m capable of?

The answer was no. It was clearly, obviously, uncomplicatedly no. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.

So I started posting. Honestly, without a strategy and without knowing if anyone would care. Every post was a small act of saying: this is me, this is what I believe, this is what I’m building. And something unexpected happened. The gap between who I wanted to be and who I was actually becoming started to close. Not because anyone validated me, though people did, overwhelmingly, in ways I hadn’t anticipated. But because showing up honestly every day, even on the hard days, even when I was still grieving the old life or teetering on the edge of doubt, made me more certain of myself. Confidence, it turns out, is not something you think your way into. It’s something you build by doing the thing you’re afraid to do, repeatedly, until the fear gets quieter than the conviction.

The real haters did eventually show up. They always do when you grow fast enough to be visible. I was bracing and ready for this but what I didn’t expect was that they helped me. Not because their criticism was useful, it mostly wasn’t, but because of what it clarified. The people trying hardest to rattle you are almost always the ones who never gave themselves permission to try. Their noise is not about you. It is about the version of themselves that chose safety over the thing they actually wanted, and the discomfort of watching someone else choose differently. Once you see that clearly, the noise stops landing the way it used to.

I think about this when I notice how many people follow along not because they want to make ceramics or leave their jobs, but because of that feeling of what if. I get it from so many people, in comments and DMs and conversations at events. The what if is universal. It lives in everyone, regardless of where they are in life, regardless of how much they love their work or their team or their life. Because we are not built to want exactly what was handed to us. We are built to wonder. To imagine. To ask what else might be possible.

The imaginary haters were, in a strange way, protecting that wondering. Keeping it small and safe and private where no one could touch it. What I had to learn, slowly and imperfectly, is that the wondering doesn’t come true in private. It only comes true when you let it out into the world and find out what it’s made of.

The imaginary haters are still there sometimes. I don’t think they ever fully leave. But they are quieter now than they have ever been. And I am louder. And that gap keeps closing every single day that I choose to show up anyway.

There is a version of this story where I dramatically quit. Where I walked into my manager’s office on a Tuesday morning with my resignation letter already written, having made my decision cleanly and courageously, ready to announce the beginning of my new life.

That is not what happened.

What actually happened is quieter and messier and I think more honest, and probably more familiar to anyone who has ever stood at the edge of a life they weren’t sure they wanted anymore and had to figure out whether to jump or wait for the tide to make the decision for them.

I waited for the tide.

It started eight months before the end, though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. I had started going to the ceramics studio after work, just a few nights a week at first, then more. Five to nine, after nine to five. I would leave my desk, still carrying whatever the day had asked of me, drive to Mudflat, sit down at the wheel, and feel something in my body unknot that I hadn’t realized was clenched. The outside world stopped existing for a while. There was only the clay and my hands and the piece becoming itself beneath my fingers.

I barely stopped to eat. This is notable because eating is genuinely my love language.

At the time I told myself it was a hobby. A creative outlet. The thing that balanced out the spreadsheets and the Zoom calls and the corporate speak that made me want to rip my ears off by Thursday afternoon. I had developed a habit of pretending my camera was broken in meetings, sometimes my microphone too, just to get a few minutes of not having to hold my face in the right shape while my soul quietly left the building. I was getting through the days. The studio was where I went to actually live them.

But somewhere in those eight months, something shifted. I stopped thinking of the wheel as the thing I did after work and started thinking of work as the thing I did before the wheel. The order of importance had quietly reversed and I hadn’t announced it to anyone, including myself.

The company started slowing down before the official news came. There wasn’t much left to do. I could feel it the way you feel a wave starting to crest, that moment just before it breaks when everything goes still and you understand what’s about to happen. In mid-February the first round of layoffs hit. Colleagues I had worked alongside for years were suddenly out, and almost immediately a support chat appeared, full of people sharing job leads, company referrals, openings at places that were hiring in our field. Former managers sent me direct messages with roles on their new teams. I would love to have you, they said. And they meant it. These were good people who believed in me, who wanted good things for me, who were handing me the path forward with both hands.

I sat in that chat like a frog in slowly heating water, watching the links go by, and I knew.

I knew because I clicked on some of them. I went to the websites of the companies that were hiring. I read the job descriptions, and something happened in my body that I was not prepared for. I wanted to throw up. Not because the jobs were bad or the companies were wrong or the people offering them were anything other than kind. But because something in the shape of it, the language of it, the format of a life it was describing, felt like a door I had already walked through and closed behind me without realizing I had done it.

I still wanted to go back. Part of me did. I knew it was safe. I knew I was young and capable and that the path was right there, laid out so clearly by people who genuinely cared what happened to me. And there was this voice underneath everything asking who do I think I am? Who do I think I am to want something different at 25, to want to build something of my own when good people are out here working hard just to find their footing again? Why should I get to opt out of the search that everyone around me was doing?

But there was another voice. Quieter, steadier, more persistent. It said: if not now, when?

I was 25. No children, no pets, no one depending on my income but me. I had more energy and more freedom and fewer responsibilities than I would have at any point in the future, because that is simply how life works. Responsibilities accumulate. They add up over time until you look around one day and realize the window you were waiting for has been closed for years. I looked at the math of it and understood that waiting even a few more years meant waiting to live the life I actually wanted, and I could not find a good enough reason to do that.

So I stopped swimming back out.

I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters. I did not quit. I got furloughed at the end of March 2025, and I decided not to look for another job in the corporate world. When the official layoff came in June, I was already two months into building my first ceramics collection. I had already been through the grief of it, the identity shift of it, the terrifying and clarifying work of becoming someone whose hands were the point. The layoff was almost administrative at that point. A formality that matched a decision I had already made in private.

I am not going to pretend that is the same as walking away from a steady salary on a regular Tuesday. It is not. It is easier. The people who do that, who have a good job and a consistent paycheck and choose to leave anyway, who write the resignation letter and hand it in and watch the safety net disappear voluntarily, those people are doing something harder than what I did. I want to name that clearly because I think honesty about how we actually make our biggest decisions matters more than the cleaner story.

What I did was simpler and stranger. I just stopped opting in. I let the wave carry me to shore, and when I felt the sand under my feet I decided not to swim back out. I turned around and started walking inland instead, away from the water, away from the current that had been carrying me for years, toward something I could not yet see clearly but that felt, for the first time in a long time, like it might actually be mine.

The name of this publication is Somewhere to Land, this is the first essay in the paid version of this publication. I’ve been thinking about why that phrase feels so right, and I think it’s this.

Most of us are riding a wave we didn’t choose. Society hands it to you early, this is what success looks like, this is the current, stay on it, and so you paddle out and you catch it and you ride it because that’s what you’re supposed to do and honestly, it’s not bad out there. Some people feel genuinely called to the sea. Surfers live for that feeling, the power of it, the freedom of it, the way the ocean makes them feel alive. That life is real and it’s valid and it’s theirs.

But I kept waiting to feel called to it the way they did. And the call never came.

What I wanted was something steadier. Something I could plant my feet on. Something where I could carve my name into the land and say this is mine, and then spend the rest of my life exploring what that meant, going deeper instead of faster, building instead of just staying afloat.

The wave was always going to bring me here eventually. I just stopped swimming back out before it did.

Somewhere to Land is not about arrival. It’s about what happens when you finally stop letting the current decide where you go. It’s about the terrifying, unglamorous, deeply human work of walking inland and figuring out what you actually want to build.

I’m still walking. Come with me if you want to see where this goes.

A week ago I posted a carousel on Instagram that apparently hit a nerve. Almost 80,000 views, 1000 saves, 240 comments, dozens of DMs from people saying some version of the same thing: I feel this. I’m scared. How did you do it.

So I wanted to give you more than ten slides.

I left a six-figure engineering career at 25 to make ceramics with my hands. And I’m not going to tell you it was the bravest thing I’ve ever done, because it didn’t feel like bravery. It felt like necessity. Like I had already left a long time ago and my body just hadn’t caught up yet.

Everyone asks if I’m happy now. Friends, family, strangers in my comments. It’s always the first question, and the answer is always yes, unhesitatingly. But happiness is a strange thing to land on after a leap like this, because it doesn’t cancel out the hard parts. It just sits alongside them. You can be completely certain you made the right choice and still feel the grief of it, still feel the fear of it, still have days where the doubt is loud and the confidence is quiet. What nobody tells you is that happy and easy are not the same word. I confused them for a long time.

The grief surprised me most. I chose to leave. I saved for it, planned for it, wanted it more than almost anything. And then I watched that number stop hitting my account and something in my chest tightened anyway. It wasn’t regret. It was mourning something I hadn’t expected to miss, which wasn’t really the salary at all. It was the proof. The proof that the years of school and grinding and performing had meant something. The salary was the scoreboard, and without it I had to find a different way to know I was worth something. That process is slower and stranger and more beautiful than I expected, but it doesn’t happen overnight and nobody warns you that it won’t.

What also nobody warns you about is how little of your time you will spend actually doing the thing you left for. I am a ceramicist. Making things with my hands is the dream I left for. But on any given day I am also the marketer, the photographer, the bookkeeper, the shipping department, the customer service team, and the content creator. All of it, alone. In corporate there was always someone else handling the thing you weren’t good at. Now there is only you, and you will either learn it or let it fall. Most days you learn it. Some days you let it fall and try again tomorrow. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos I found something I hadn’t expected, which was that I loved it. Not because it’s easy, but because every single decision is mine. I can decide on a Sunday night to start something new and have it live before I go to sleep. That speed, that ownership, that feeling of moving at the pace of your own mind, I didn’t know I was starving for it until I finally had it.

But the hardest thing, the one I still don’t fully have words for, was what happened to my sense of self. For months after I left I introduced myself by my old job title. Engineer. It just came out, because I didn’t know who I was outside of what I did for someone else. Your career becomes your personality in ways you don’t notice until it’s gone, and when you leave there’s this disorienting in-between period where you’re not who you were but you’re not fully who you’re becoming yet either. I used to walk into rooms full of successful people and feel anchored by having a clean answer to the question of what I did. Without that answer I had to learn how to just be a person, which sounds simple and is actually one of the more destabilizing things I’ve ever done. I live in that in-between still sometimes. But the distance between who I was supposed to be and who I actually am keeps getting smaller. And the one I’m growing into fits so much better.

None of this stopped me from working harder than I ever did in corporate. Willingly, joyfully, relentlessly. I think about this business when I wake up and when I go to sleep and sometimes in the middle of the night when an idea refuses to leave me alone. The hours are longer. The stakes feel higher. But every single one of those hours comes back to me, not to a quarterly earnings report, not to someone else’s vision, to me and to something I’m building with my own hands and my own name on it. I used to work hard in a way that hollowed me out by Friday. Now I work hard in a way that fills me up. That difference is the whole thing. I can’t fully explain it to someone who hasn’t felt it yet. You just have to experience it once and then you understand why people who’ve crossed over rarely want to go back.

Putting myself out there was the part I resisted longest. I had zero personal social media before this. I dragged my feet for over a year to even set up my ceramics account on Instagram, because I was afraid of being seen and more specifically afraid of being seen failing. There is something uniquely vulnerable about building in public, about every post being a quiet declaration: this is me, this is what I believe, this is what I’m trying. I started posting honestly, without a strategy, without a safety net, just the truth of what I was living. And strangers decided it was worth staying for. I don’t think I understood how much I needed that until it happened. Not the numbers. The feeling of being seen by people who had no reason to be kind and chose to be anyway. It healed something in me I didn’t have a name for before.

Not everyone will be kind, of course. As you grow, some people will question your choices, doubt your staying power, or be unkind in ways that have nothing to do with you and everything to do with their own unlived lives. I have found that the people trying hardest to rattle you are almost always the ones who never gave themselves permission to try. Their noise is about their own fear. And once you see that clearly, it stops landing the way it used to.

I am happier on my worst pottery day than I was on my best corporate day. Not because everything has gone to plan, not because every piece comes out right or every month hits its goals or every decision I make is the correct one. But because I am building something that is mine. Something I can hold in my hands. Something with my fingerprints on it, literally and figuratively. That math is different from anything I have ever known, and I am still learning how to trust it.

I’m still in it. Still figuring it out. Still scared some days, but now less and less as the gap between who I was building towards and who I am now is closing with each day I show up fearlessly (and sometimes, fearfully).

If any part of this felt familiar, if you’re somewhere between the life you’re supposed to want and the one you actually do, I want you to know you’re not alone. And you don’t have to have it all figured out before you begin. Nobody does. The figuring out is the whole point.

I don’t call my grandmother enough. Growing up, my mom was always the bridge between us, the one who made the call, held the phone, translated not just the language but the distance between our worlds. When I moved to Boston, I had to figure out how to have a relationship with her on my own, across an ocean and a language I speak imperfectly and a generational gap so wide I sometimes don’t know what to say when I hear her voice.

But I knew I had to call her. I had left my job, left the career my whole family had understood as the point of everything, and I needed her to hear it from me.

I was nervous in a way I hadn’t expected. Of all the people I didn’t want to disappoint, she was at the top of the list, though I couldn’t have fully explained why. Maybe because she is the beginning of the story. The place where all of it started, long before my parents ever boarded a plane or held my hand or watched me graduate from anything. She had survived things I can barely comprehend, built a life from nothing after being abandoned as a young girl because her family simply had too many daughters and could not keep her. Everything I have, every option I have ever been given, traces back in some way to her stubbornness and her refusal to be defined by what she was handed.

And I was about to tell her I had walked away from the thing she would have called success.

I got on the phone. I told her I had left my engineering job. I told her I was starting my own business. Making ceramics. She got very excited, the way she does. "Oh, do you have a factory?" she asked.

I had to explain, carefully, through the translation gap and the generational gap and the gap between what building something looks like from inside America versus watching it from a small apartment in Fuzhou, that no, grandma, it is not a factory. It is just me. I work out of a shared community studio where three hundred other artists also work. I don't even have my own space yet. I make ceramic pieces with my hands, maybe a hundred a month when things are going well, sometimes less, and I don't even sell all of them. I am one person. No employees, no factory floor, no export operation. Just a wheel and some clay and a kiln and whatever I can figure out between now and the end of the month.

She was quiet for a moment. And then she said: “well, you are a pioneer.”

I didn’t expect to cry. But I did, because I hadn’t known she saw me that way. And because the word she used wasn’t just a compliment. In Chinese, the word is 创业, chuàngyè. It means to start an undertaking, to do pioneering work. Broken into its parts: 创, to start, to achieve something for the first time. 业, a line of business, an occupation, a life’s work. And there is a proverb that goes with it, one I looked up after we hung up: 创业难，守业更难. It is hard to start an enterprise, but even harder to keep it up.

My almost-ninety-year-old grandmother, who built her entire life from nothing, who knows better than almost anyone alive what it costs to begin something with your bare hands and no guarantee of what comes next, looked at what I was doing and called it pioneering work. She wasn’t being kind. She was being precise.

But I hadn’t always understood it that way myself. It took me a long time, and a question from another family member, to understand what I was actually choosing and what it meant that I got to choose it at all.

My uncle once asked me why I was spending my time making pottery when I could be working for a big corporation, sitting at a comfortable desk, not working with my hands at all. He asked it plainly, almost kindly, the way someone asks a practical question they already think has an obvious answer. He wanted to know if I actually liked it.

At first, I didn’t know how to respond. The question caught me off guard, not because it was unkind, but because it revealed how differently we understood the same thing. Of course I liked it. I loved it. I loved the feeling of wet clay slipping under my palms, the quiet concentration, the moment when something I imagined began to exist outside my body. I loved making something slowly, deliberately, with my hands. I struggled to understand how that wasn’t obvious.

But I realized he wasn’t really asking about pottery.

To him, working with his hands had never been a choice. It was labor. It was exhaustion. It was necessity. His hands were tools for survival, not expression. They did what they had to do so that the next day could come. When he looked at clay, he didn’t see possibility. He saw the kind of work he had spent his life trying to escape. In his mind, a desk job was not confinement. It was arrival.

I understood then that we were speaking from different histories. And there was something else underneath his question that I didn’t fully appreciate until later. My family is from Fuzhou, in Fujian province, not far from Jingdezhen, China’s ancient porcelain capital, the city that has been making ceramics for over a thousand years and exporting them to the rest of the world for almost as long. The craft I chose for meaning is the craft my ancestors did for survival. Somewhere in my family’s history, hands that look like mine were shaping clay not as a creative practice but as a way to eat, to live, to make it through another season. My uncle wasn’t confused by my choice. He recognized it. That was exactly the problem.

My parents immigrated so that I would never have to orient my life entirely around survival. Their work was about endurance, stability, getting through. They carried the uncertainty, the long hours, the invisibility, so that my life could be wider than necessity. They built a floor strong enough for me to stand on and ask a different question: not what will keep me safe, but what will make my life feel true.

My uncle grew up in a world where risk was dangerous and comfort was earned through sacrifice. In that world, choosing a harder path voluntarily made no sense. Why struggle if you didn’t have to? Why work with your hands when your body had already paid its dues?

But my hands had not known that kind of labor. They had known books, pencils, keyboards, soft routines. When I worked with clay, it wasn’t to survive. It was to make meaning. That difference mattered more than I had realized.

Later, I felt a quiet gratitude settle in me. Not guilt. Gratitude. I could see clearly that my life was the outcome of a long chain of sacrifices that were never meant to be repeated, only honored. The point was not for me to suffer in the same ways, but to live differently because of them.

When my uncle asked if I liked it, what he was really asking was whether it was worth it. Whether choosing something uncertain could ever be justified. I wish I had known how to tell him that my answer existed because of him, because of my parents, because of everything they endured.

And when my grandmother called me a pioneer, I think she already knew all of this. She had lived it. She understood, maybe better than anyone, that the hardest kind of beginning is the one where no one has gone before you and nothing is guaranteed and you go anyway.

Their job was survival. Mine is allowed to be meaning.

And every time I shape something from clay, I am not rejecting where I come from. I am standing inside what their hope made possible.