Off they go

Two and a half years since I signed the contract. One year since I submitted the manuscript. Today, I mailed a box to my publisher. I didn’t count the tokens inside, but there are hundreds of them, headed across the country fto be photographed for my book.

Each zip bag is labeled in Sharpie: Gouache. Pen Drawing. Fingerpainting. Gel Plate Botanicals. Collage. Just my handwriting saying, "Here’s this chapter."

Individually, they’re techniques but together, they’re two years of paying attention. Hours of noticing, trying things, making mistakes, refining ideas. Carrying those tiny pieces into coffee shops, airports, hospitals, grocery stores, and street corners until they became conversations with strangers.

I’ve made well over a thousand additional tokens during the same stretch of time I made these. Almost all of them are in other people’s hands now—kept, tucked into wallets, pinned to bulletin boards, slipped inside books, or simply remembered. Everything else I’ve made is out in the world somewhere, in someone else’s keeping.

This box is what’s left of me, here.

The book will show polished photographs. Readers will see finished tokens.

What they won’t see is the wonderfully unglamorous reality behind them: handwritten labels, plastic bags, a cardboard box, and years of quiet consistent making.

It struck me as I walked to the post office that this isn’t just a shipment. It’s an archive. A snapshot of what my visual language looked like in this season of my life.

We often imagine creative careers through the finished product. But more often they look like this:

A cardboard box.

A walk to the post office.

And enough ordinary days, repeated with care, that one day you look back and realize you’ve built a body of work.

માનસી