this saturday arrived with nothing on my calendar, and my body produced the precise adrenaline of a missed meeting.
i supposed i could clean. reorganize my google drive. alphabetize something in a cabinet that had not asked to be alphabetized. check my phone. check it again. lie on the floor in the manner of a woman awaiting further instruction.
instead i opened linkedin, which tells you everything.
nothing makes me fear for the human spirit quite like logging onto linkedin.
i had not looked at it in months — and a chill moved through my body at a slight delay, like something buffering.
everyone was delighted to announce. humbled to share. leveraging learnings. maximizing impact. the entire platform read like one long performance review conducted by people who had begun referring to themselves as deliverables.
i closed the tab and felt deliciously superior.
this lasted precisely until i registered what i had just done with an entirely free morning. i had gone looking to manage tiny jobs around my home.
which is inconvenient, because i left all of this!
a year ago i walked out of the corporate version of my life + began building something i actually wanted to be inside of.
the scenery had changed dramatically. but alas, the performance review had just moved in-house. there i was trying to turn an empty saturday into evidence that i had used it correctly. as though feeling alive was a metric i had simply failed to track. as though i could kpi my way into it.
i might not have noticed the experiment was failing had wednesday not provided a counterexample.
that night, i did something completely indefensible. purely for fun.
i spent the evening on the floor of a clothing store with my legs in the air.
the useful self is not a job you can quit
none of this is a story about hating my job.
i speak corporate fluently. nearly half a decade in market research. an executive seat at a global tax company. an ai company i co-founded that has since been acquired.
i have circled back, aligned stakeholders + leveraged enough learnings to qualify for witness protection.
i was good at it. that is the part that sometimes gets told wrong.
corporate burnout does not always present as collapse. sometimes you are excellent at your job. people reward you for being useful, so you become useful everywhere.
in meetings. in friendships. at dinner when somebody needs a decision reached before the entrées arrive.
and the genuinely diabolical part is that the useful self is beloved. she is reliable. she is who people text. nobody stages an intervention for a woman who is simply very good at things.
so when you finally go — when you quit, pivot, build the beautiful thing — she comes with you.
and the life she unpacked into is, by any reasonable measure, a good one.
i write + consult full-time. that now looks like helping luxury brands articulate who they are. shooting campaign imagery for tech companies you likely have an account with. sitting front row at new york fashion week. attending buying appointments where i weigh in on the edit + not-so-gently collect material for whatever i might overanalyze next.
last week, a potential client placed a $650,000 necklace in my hands. for research!
i smile as i type this, because none of it was accidental. i arranged my life around the things i find beautiful, deliberately + at some cost.
but now at all hours, i catch my useful self clocking in. taking one look around the gorgeous life i built + asking how the gorgeousness will be deployed.
coffee on the roof begins auditioning for a substack note. getting dressed becomes content production. an afternoon with no plans presents less like freedom + more like an operational oversight.
was it meaningful enough? did i document it? could it become something? if the pleasure leaves no evidence behind, did i use the afternoon correctly?
to be clear, turning beauty over in my mind is not the administrative burden. it is the entire premise of this publication. the problem begins when nothing is permitted to remain beautiful without also becoming useful.
but a life is not wasted simply because some of it cannot be repurposed.
which has become my less glamorous fixation lately: am i creating a life i want — or merely becoming extremely efficient at managing one?1
the wednesday in question
on september 30, at roughly nine in the evening, i was lying on the floor of idlewild boutique with my legs in the air.
behind me, two grown men lay behind a translucent screen, strobing their hands through the light. someone adjusted a lamp. someone else said do it again, but worse.
we were attempting to make a pair of gloves read as something between a fashion object, a piece of choreography + an unidentified life-form.
naturally.
the direction deteriorated as the night went on. more creature. less creature. like it wants something from us.
each attempt gave us another idea. a movement looked strange, so we made it stranger. someone laughed + we tried it again. apparently we all had very specific opinions about a glove’s inner life. lamp placement proved contentious.
i laughed until my stomach hurt. somewhere in there, several hours passed without my checking a phone.
ten days earlier, this had been an idea in a group chat. but tessa2 + i have a question we have learned to take extremely seriously, and it is not what is the opportunity here.
it is wouldn’t it be fun if…
within a week and a half the question had acquired lighting. cameras. a production schedule. an edit, an installation plan + a group of friends who rearranged their weeks for it. between us, several decades of hard-won expertise. not one formal qualification in glove sentience.
every hand in the film belonged to an actual person. even the ones that appeared to have escaped anatomical supervision. no synthetic limbs, no generated footage — just human beings standing behind a screen, using their bodies to make other bodies look strange.
we called it grasp: silent, surrealist + composed almost entirely of hands misbehaving.
by october 3, it was looping across the idlewild storefront:
i spent an entire evening + the full use of my back and came away with more than i brought. that is not how spending is supposed to work.
your joy has been deemed nonessential
not forbidden. merely placed after the emails, the invoice, the errands + every other hour capable of producing a more defensible return.
i know the objection, because i have made it myself — usually around eleven on a sunday night while planning the week.
you cannot reasonably justify an evening spent making a glove look sentient when there are legitimate obligations with your name attached to them.
so let me make the counter-argument badly first, and then properly.
badly: you deserve joy.
true. has never once motivated me off the couch.
properly: your joy does not stay in you.
think about the last time a stranger’s outfit made your day. not online — a woman on the sidewalk in an incredible coat. an unreasonable boot. sunglasses indoors, worn like someone with somewhere important to be. you thought about her for an hour. you may still think about her occasionally.
fuck — i’m thinking of her now!
she has no idea. she was not performing for you — she got dressed with intention + some of it escaped. she left a little evidence on the sidewalk for you to collect as you passed.
that is the actual mechanism. joy is not a private resource. it is contagious + very badly contained. which means the math has been backwards this whole time. we treat joy the way we treat the good dress: saved for an occasion that would justify it. protected from the indignities of actual use.
the dress, at least, might hold its value in storage.
joy does the opposite. it depreciates when deferred. it compounds when spent.
but joy cannot spill very far when productivity has already claimed every available hour.
work is seductive because the return is easy to recognize. hours become money, recognition, progress. you can point to what you did + understand why the time was spent.
the less measurable parts of life make no such promise.
so the useful self keeps allocating. not because she is dull — because she knows how to succeed there.
you do not become a problem to anybody. you are, if anything, doing better than most people you know. but you can spend years collecting every visible proof that your choices paid off, then look up + realize the life you wanted outside of work is exactly where you left it.
for four nights, cincinnati gets overdressed
once every two years, cincinnati puts on something completely (un)necessary.
during the day, the buildings perform their assigned functions. they hold up roofs. house offices. facilitate commerce. generally behave like architecture.
after dark, they overdress.
from october 8 through 11, thirty blocks across cincinnati + northern kentucky are handed over to projection mapping, light installations, murals + interactive art. it is called BLINK, it runs 7 to 11 each night, and it is free.
a wall you have passed a thousand times develops a second life. buildings breathe. shop windows become screens. two million people abandon the most efficient route home to stand on a sidewalk looking up at a bank.
grasp is playing in one of those windows.
and what moves me is that the buildings give up nothing in the transformation. the wall still holds the roof. the bank presumably continues banking. nobody asks the projection what it intends to produce, how it plans to scale or whether there is a deck containing its five-year plan.
the building keeps its function. it simply refuses to be reduced to it.
afterward, the architecture will be structurally unchanged. but the people who stood beneath it may see it differently.
that is joy leaking at municipal scale.
we extend this possibility to architecture without question.
why are we so much stingier with ourselves?
the cheapest studio you already own
if an entire city can practice becoming more than its function, surely the rest of us can begin somewhere smaller. somewhere private, inexpensive + available before breakfast.
naturally, we land back inside the closet.
getting dressed is a creative decision you are already required to make every day. you will do it regardless. your closet is the cheapest studio you will ever have access to — and most of us are operating it as a purely defensive facility.
but a good outfit is a spell.
it changes the way you walk. it changes the sentence you were about to say. it is the fastest-acting intervention available to a woman with eleven minutes + no particular plan.
so… a few field assignments. requiring no new purchases, no witnesses:
wear the thing you’ve been saving for an occasion that never had the decency to arrive
cook dinner for yourself in a full outfit. plate it like someone is coming.
wear perfume indoors, alone
put the fancy robe on at seven. finish it with a heel.
wear sunglasses indoors like a woman with secrets + a legal team
wear jewelry to make yourself breakfast
wear something that makes a sound when you move
put on the lipstick in the drawer that frightens you slightly
wear the slip dress to the grocery store, under a coat
photograph an outfit nobody else will ever see
none of this is a makeover. you are not correcting yourself. you are practicing an uncertain return.
the lipstick might be wrong. the silhouette might not work. nobody is going to tell you whether it was worth doing, because nobody will know you did it.
which is the entire point. this is the smallest available version of the thing the useful self struggles to authorize, and the whole bet costs eleven minutes.
so the question is never does this look good.
the question is: what happens to me in this?
getting a grip
usefulness belongs in a full life. it simply cannot be the only proof that you are alive.
a year ago, i thought getting my life back would require a tighter grip. more discipline. a better system. one final optimization + the whole thing would finally hold.
turns out getting a grip + getting your life back are not always the same project.
on september 30, we produced a film. but the film was not the only thing made.
there was the pleasure of watching my friends become brilliant in directions no client had requested. play did not replace expertise. it let expertise take its bra off.
the film was real. the return was impossible to forecast.
in a previous version of my life, that uncertainty would have killed the idea. the committee of one would have asked what it was for + gently scheduled something more defensible.
it paid anyway. it is still paying.
cincinnati is about to let its buildings remain useful + become something more.
i have been on the floor awaiting further instruction. i have also been on the floor with my legs in the air, trying to make a glove look like it wanted something from us.
same floor. different question.
one version of me was waiting to be told what came next.
the other had asked: wouldn’t it be fun if…?
so put on the lipstick that frightens you. plate the dinner like someone is coming. follow one idea before it learns how to justify itself.
for four nights, the city is going to blink at you.
blink back.
a silent, surrealist short film about gloves, hands + light. conceived in a group chat, shot in an evening, installed in ten days.
where — the idlewild storefront window, 1230 Vine St, Cincinnati, OH 45202
when — october 3–11, 2026 — nightly, 8 p.m. to midnight
cost — nothing
showing in alignment with cincinnati art week (october 3–10) + BLINK cincinnati (october 8–11, 7–11 nightly, thirty-plus blocks across cincinnati + northern kentucky, also free).
made by
tessa clark: director
sarah dewald (me): performer
caroline eyer: videographer
liam haehnle: producer
alyssa remstetter: post-production
emmanuel de roquette: project manager, photographer
apparently, i cannot even question my need to produce something without producing something.
