This Is Going to Work

the first time I believed I could actually make it as a full-time artist.

Everything you are about to read almost did not happen.

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.