Now What

Pondering my new reality

Seven months ago on a bright morning in Tucson, Arizona, I woke up and sleepily entered my friend Molly’s kitchen to find her and my friend Sarah giggling. Irene, who stays up late reading, was still asleep. This group of friends is beloved to me. We giggle a lot. Teasing is our love language. They are my people. Irene, Sarah and I flew to Tucson the afternoon before, and it was our first morning at Molly’s house on what would be a weeklong trip to Arizona for a cycling adventure. Molly handed me a cup of coffee, and I poured myself a bowl of sugary high carb cereal. We were gearing (and fueling) up to head to Patagonia — the one in southern Arizona — to ride our gravel bikes with my coach Serena and other dear friends on beautiful, technical off-road terrain in the Sonoran desert.

It was December, and while I was on a mini bike vacation, I was also in the midst of getting ready for 2026 — busy filling out online forms for employee health benefits and finalizing retail plans and budgets for the following year. Maybe it was being away from my studio during this intense time of year (December is the most intense time for retail businesses), and maybe it was being in the safety of the warm cocoon of my best friends, but that morning, in the middle of the 2026 paperwork on Molly’s sofa, I finally let myself name the thing that had been gnawing at me for the past year: I don’t want to do this anymore.

Acknowledging this to myself felt complicated, because retail had for many years been my favorite part of all the various parts of my business. I loved designing creating, merchandising and selling products. For a long time, I found absolute joy in it. It was also the part of my business on which my team (Amy, Erika and Jen) worked, and this team was really beloved to me, and the retail business was equally beloved to them. It was a true labor of love for all of us. We were, by all accounts, thriving. Wonderful, devoted customers, fine-tuned infrastructure, a fantastic team, fun products, good sales. A dream.

But increasingly, I was finding myself tired and overwhelmed with retail, with constant promotion, with the drive to create, produce, and sell and the unending cycle inside of which I began to feel more and more trapped. It had begun to wear away at my nervous system and my creative energy. Admitting to myself (much less anyone else) that this thing I had worked so hard to build wasn’t something I wanted anymore felt like a kind of betrayal.

The first thing I did was to say the thought out loud. I announced to Sarah, Irene and Molly that morning that I wanted to close my retail business. I also told them I was nervous as hell. I am usually someone who dives into change willingly — I love to mix things up, try new approaches, experiment, move, and rebuild. But the thought of burning it all down was heart-wrenching. The thing that weighed on me the most was the thought of having to tell my team, who I care about deeply, and who would eventually lose their jobs if I closed.

That week, while riding my bike over some of the most desolate, beautiful and technical terrain I’d ever experienced, I processed that initial grief in real time. I cried, a lot (careful not to cry when I was in the sketchiest sections of the trails so I would, at least, not crash). I had exactly one panic attack at the end of a long dirt road leading into a chunky, loose, steep climb. Was the panic attack about the climb? Probably not. I weighed (and processed with my friends as we rode together) all my options for timing, how and when to tell my team, my production partners, and the public. They assured me unequivocally that actually doing what the heart wants — even when other people might not understand or want the same thing — is an underrated skill and absolutely always the right thing to do.

From there, everything was set into motion, at first behind the scenes, including teary conversations with my staff (teary on my end — they handled the news with a grace so profound I cannot describe it in words), and then, eventually, publicly. In in the end, I decided on a six-month runway to closure. Still, June felt so far away, like we still had forever together. More and more as time passed and we have whittled down, let go of, and sold off all the things, I have begun to work through my grief and feel more a sense of being both grounded and light, which also makes me realize that this was, as my friends had assured me, absolutely what I needed to do. I hadn’t decided to burn it down after all; I had decided to end it before it ended me, and, in this way, I was able to celebrate it, my memories of it sturdy and beautiful.

And so these days the question is, now what? I have not had the privilege of that question in a very long time. For nearly twenty years, my life has been a series of very big decisions, commitments, actions, and follow-through. I have, in this ending, created space for myself to move into something new and different, less structured and less demanding, something that I hope calms my nervous system and also gets me making art again (I’ve taken a much needed break from that lately).

The answer is, I don’t know exactly what is next, and that’s okay. I am going to take a break this summer to allow myself the opportunity to absorb this change before I fill the space with anything. What does it feel like to have more spaciousness? What does it feel like to not have to promote this thing or that day after day on the internet? To no longer manage people and large amounts of money and payroll?

I am currently co-writing a book, which is work but not a full time job, and I will continue to take client illustration commissions and brand collaborations for the foreseeable future. I am creating and soon-to-be-filming a class with my friend Emily McDowell which will launch in 2027. I am keeping a very small online shop open on my website where I will continue to sell limited edition serigraphs and risograph prints and occasional drops of original art. I will continue to spend a lot of time riding my bike. I have already read more books this year than I have in the last four years combined. In short, I already have a pretty full life. I will simply have more space and time to . . . who knows??

And that is exactly where I’d like to be.

I’ll let you know how it’s going. Stay tuned.

(Photo above by my beloved friend Molly Cameron, Patagonia AZ, December, 2025)