Getting back to the studio after an interruption is not always graceful. There's fumbling. I put things down in the wrong place. My mind keeps drifting when my hands need it to stay. That's just the truth of returning to something after life has pulled you away from it for a few days.
The world outside was not making it easier.
It never does anymore. Every morning brings a new thing to absorb — another policy, another threat, another piece of news that sits in the chest like something heavy and doesn't move. Being a Black woman in America in this particular moment means carrying a specific weight that doesn't clock out when the studio opens. It comes in with me. It sits at my design table. It has opinions about whether I have the energy to make something beautiful today.
And yet.
The work still needs to happen. Not because anyone is demanding it. Because the business is real and the bills are real and the dream of building something that is entirely mine is real. Small businesses don't get days off from interruptions. They don't get days off from the news. They get the same twenty-four hours as everyone else and they have to decide what to do with them.
What I decided was to pick up a stone.
Peridot specifically. That yellow-green that doesn't ease me in — just arrives at full intensity and waits for me to catch up. The color of something insisting on being alive. Sitting with a heavy mind and a week that had taken something out of me, holding that stone was the whole session some days. Not designing. Not planning. Just holding something that beautiful and letting it remind me why any of this matters.
Making beautiful things in a world that is working hard to be ugly is not an escape. It's a refusal. Every piece of jewelry that comes out of this studio is a quiet insistence that color matters, that beauty matters, that the particular joy a woman feels when she puts on something that was made entirely for her — that matters too.
Showing up to the studio this week was not easy. Some days it is genuinely hard. But the peridot was there. And the work was there. And the reminder that this is what resistance looks like for me — deliberate, personal, one stone at a time — was enough.
Still here. Still creating.