How to stop worrying about things you can’t control and embrace creative play in the North.
The universe is currently ghosting your plans. It doesn’t care about your aesthetic vision or your meticulously curated Notion board.
Seriously, bestie, you are spiraling over the most random stuff that literally does not have ears. You’re out here trying to fight the literal wind because it ruined your outdoor shoot, or you’re losing sleep because the local arts council hasn’t replied to an email you sent four minutes ago. It is giving very much “Main Character Syndrome” in a world where the NPCs are actual bears and black flies. We live in Northern Ontario; if the weather wants to dump three feet of snow on your gallery opening, the weather is going to do exactly that. You can’t gaslight the atmosphere into being cooperative.
We need to talk about your “control-freak-coded” behavior before you actually short-circuit. There is a specific kind of dignity in just throwing your hands up and saying, “This is a disaster and I’m obsessed with it.” When your tablet dies and you lose the sketch, or the thrifted yarn you bought turns out to be cursed, that is not a sign from the gods that you should quit. It’s just the universe being a chaotic little gremlin. Instead of trying to manifest a reality that doesn’t exist, try being the most delusional person in the room by leaning into the mess.
If you can’t control the output, control the vibe. Make art that is objectively bad on purpose because the pressure to be a “prodigy” is a scam designed to sell you subscription-based software. Paint something that looks like a sleep-deprived toddler did it. Write a poem that is so cringe it makes your ancestors want to change their last names. The moment you stop worrying about the things you can’t change—like the economy, the algorithm, or the fact that it’s dark at 4 PM—you suddenly have so much more energy to actually play. Play is the only thing that matters in the long run anyway.
It is deeply unserious to think you can micromanage the trajectory of your entire creative career while living in a town where the most exciting thing that happened this week was a sale on winter tires. We spend so much time trying to optimize our lives for success that we forget that we are literally just vibrating meat sacks on a rock in the middle of nowhere. Your worth is not tied to how well you navigate the chaos; it’s tied to how much you can laugh while the ship is sinking.
So, let the project fail. Let the grant get rejected. Let the rain ruin your hair. You are still here, you are still weird, and you are still the only person who can do your specific brand of creative nonsense. Stop trying to play God and start playing with the mud in your backyard. It’s a lot more fun, and honestly, the mud has better vibes than your stress levels right now.
Thoughts on art and the state of the world!
These fragments trace the rhizomatic flow of thought through art, life, and place — scattered impressions from studio corners, fleeting ideas scrawled in notebooks, whispered exchanges at galleries, and observations picked up on quiet northern roads. Some fragments linger on technique, intuition, and doubt; others drift through community, culture, and the subtle poetry of everyday moments. They offer no conclusions, only openings, inviting readers to follow connections wherever they emerge.
Wandering laterally between process, memory, and environment, these pieces map associations across creativity, identity, and belonging. They intersect with humor, failure, resilience, and collaboration, and trace the ways artistic thinking seeps into gardens, small-town rhythms, friendships, and civic life across Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario — and further afield. Each thought functions as a node, part of a living network of reflection, expanding and branching with possibility.
Discover more associative fragments, conceptual wanderings, and artful reflections on our thoughts page.
