School ends in nine days, and I've been spending my studio time finishing work, preparing surprises, and sitting with some questions that refuse to stay quiet.
I recorded a video for you today because sometimes the sharing needs to happen in real time, before the words are fully formed on the page.
What I've been working on
A final custom commission for 2025—watercolor floral bookmarks for a longtime reader's teacher gifts. I'm including a short video of them below because they brought me so much joy to make, and I think you'll see why.
What I'm sending your way
Special mail to a small group of people in this Studio. When it arrives, you'll understand something I can't quite explain yet—a quiet shift that happened while I was making these pieces, something my hand knew before my mind caught up.
What I'm sitting with
Yesterday I attended a workshop with writer Elizabeth Austin on what “platform” really means as a writer: not followers, not reach, but the emotional territory I return to again and again. Motherhood. Marriage. Childhood wounds. Cultural displacement. Identity. The questions I circle because they’re the ones that built me. She said something that has stayed with me since last evening in response to a question I asked: “If you want to understand your through-line, keep asking why the theme keeps coming up for you.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing. Asking why. Sitting with why. Following why.
Some answers are easy. Some are uncomfortable. Some feel like homecoming.
I wrote something deeply vulnerable that exposes my faults, my inheritance, my working through this messy middle ... sharing it here first with you.
I'm bringing the fullness of myself into 2026. Not the version I thought I should become, but the one I've finally come home to. Into my writing. Into my gatherings. Into this Studio.
Thank you for being the ones I can share this with in real time.
Thank you for making my work feel like enough.
You are my definition of enoughness.
More, soon.
XOXO
Mansi.
