Hello and (as a dragon) Happy Year of the Dragon!

Following a pattern of posting an update every 2 years so far (see: 2020 Update & 2022 Update), so popping in again to do just that.

A quick overview:

• 2022 was mostly filled with wedding planning and navigating the new job I started in 2021 and mourning the loss of our older rabbit, Kapi, at the end of the year in December.
• 2023 was filled with wedding celebrations, both of us getting laid off after our wedding, a couple international trips, and also navigating another new job!
• 2024 started out with a huge re-organization and clean up of our house because it was such a mess from wedding planning, working, and traveling.

With a new living room layout, new shiny bookshelves to organize our collection, library, and wedding trinkets, as well as a cleaned up home office, that gave me much needed peace, comfort, and energy. So I spent a lot of January cleaning up, then resting and enjoying our space.

Finally settling down in a space that feels like home again, it gave me the opportunity to sift through a bunch of things I’d hoarded (like art supplies) and see some old unfinished projects surface.

Knitting was something that I ended up pulling out of some open storage cubes on my shelf and got back into. It’s been a nice unplug and an actual way of doing something crafty with little to no pressure: it’s either a gift or for myself. A way of doing art for myself, again finally.

I also caved and started a bsky account with the obvious handle, @mayenedesign.bsky.social, to have a shiny new place to think about how to move forward with my arts and crafts.

I reflected a bit on being able to make art. As I’ve focused on my career, I’ve moved further away from creative design and illustration and honed in on things like UX design, accessibility and inclusive design, app development, product strategy, all those tech things.

Times that I’ve been able to “make art for myself” where it hasn’t been productized or pushed as a small business thing in recent times have been few and far between, including but limited to: designing and handmaking our whole wedding invitation suite and event details (which, honestly, wasn’t just for myself), learning calligraphy to hand-address envelopes, one kind-of self-portrait painting I did at a team UX summit at the end of 2021, and maybe a couple doodles here and there.

In my self-reflection (and a discussion with my therapist), I thought about how my most personally creative moments have had some key factors behind them: having a lot of strong emotions to process and/or being in a state of “isolation” (think: sheltering in place for the first year of the pandemic, or even farther back than that, being stuck at home in high school because I wasn’t allowed to go out), as well as some pressure applied (like having to get wedding invitations done and sent).

That said, it was also a gentle reminder that it’s ok to not be actively creating all the time and rest is important, but also these are skills that need nurturing and regular practice.

I had also been working on a super short interactive story in Twine at the end of last year and completed the story, then my computer crashed hard in October and I lost the files since I was using Twine locally and I forgot to export my story file. I was a bit heartbroken at that and didn’t care to try and rehash the whole story as I had it, and figured I’d redo it when I got around to it.

The short story is called “A.D.O.R.E.” (A Day Of Rest & Exploration), and was a break from the much larger and complex interactive story I had been working on previously about a pink box in a kitchen. ADORE and one other short story (BORN) are my plans to write something much smaller as just a cute little thing to have up on itch.io.

Now, running back through the past month and a half, I have better intentions around resting and creating, and while I want to “do art”, I also don’t want to stress myself out. But, I hope that I’ll get back into the curves and crumbs of donuts this year and make some fun stuff!