Tag: writing

A Shy Girl Goes To The DMV

I’d say this photo, featured above accurately represents how I feel in situations like going to the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) to renew my driver’s license. It’s a blur of moments, faces, government jargon, and touch screens. The big stack of papers signed and passed along in the process of closing on a house is more etched in my brain than the 20 minutes at my local DMV location. There is something about the dull, harsh lighting and bland walls covered in bulletins, electronic screens, and directions. It’s overstimulating and yet underwhelming. It is not a place I feel comfortable in.

This feeling began many years ago during the driver’s permit test process, in a different DMV, equally dull and filled with too many signs and screens. There was always one piece of information I was missing. A document my mom and I forgot, or a process out of order. The test was deceptively easy to study and terrifyingly tricky when taken, and I almost missed too many answers due to the sheer amount of distraction of the dull yet harsh environment.

This time, was one of those such times. Renewing in 2017 was easy, it was a new DMV with friendly people. Renewing in 2021 was an absolute breeze because there was no need to go in for the photo, just click and pay at home. It spoiled me. Renewing this time in 2025 was one of those DMV experiences fraught with tricky trip-ups.

Not surprising for me, it’s been a place I have been thwarted for years, from nervously failing the parallel park portion because I was afraid of my test proctor and his gruff demeanor or forgetting to keep my permit up-to-date and having to renew to test to wait four months for another testing time. The government process is nothing if not inefficient and a war of attrition.

The gauntlet was thrown down. Waiting for Christmas and New Year to pass, I renewed my license online and got stuck in a loop of changing my address. I then could not reach the process to renew anymore, because it was updating my address. So I mailed my renewal and waited. I then received two separate address updates for the license set to expire, but no update on my renewal.

Two weeks passed and I began to anxiously check the internet for a timeline – usually within 15 business days. Oh no, business days…I sent it in the mail on Jan 2, how many days would spend in the USPS system? Then a former president passed, delaying mail service. Was renewing it a month in advance not enough?! We then checked online, showing it had been renewed. Phew! But, when? I received another piece of mail, updating my voter registration automatically, but no temporary license or camera card.

Each day as the mail came, I ran to check it like Ralphie waiting for his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder pen. I began to worry, was my license going to expire waiting for it to show? Was it all going to unravel because of the sluggish pace of the government institution? How was I going to follow behind in my car when my husband’s car went for inspection in February? Was it back to walking for me?

Then one beautiful day I heard the mailbox close with a slam (it’s a very old cast iron mailbox), I scurried from my work room and descended the stairs with the promise of the future in my eyes. My delight was palpable as my hand pulled a DMV envelope from the mailbox. The envelope tore with ease, revealing the temporary license and camera card in my hands. All was saved!

On the next good weather weekend (it’s been a winter of snow squalls) we made our way to the DMV for the last battle left, the camera portion. Now as a shy person, this is the part that still makes me want to recoil. I never liked picture day at school. When a camera is pointed at me I can’t smile normally. I feel like a spotlight bears down upon me, filling me with dread. My smile looks unnatural, sometimes like a grimace if I smile with teeth. If I smile with a closed mouth like I did throughout my braces era, it looks uncomfortable, my shyness written across my face.

Filled with shyness, I sallied forth, pulling my ticket in preparation for a long wait. To my surprise, my number was called immediately and I had to go to a completely separate area, by myself. Something I dread in unfamiliar places. So in a flurry of adrenaline, I went into the photo room and unbeknownst to me went to the wrong side of the table to sit down. The DMV lady shouted at me, my face immediately turning red. Embarrassed and ashamed at my accident, my apologies flowed forth. She continued to scold me in front of the other citizens there to get their photo. It was incredibly awkward.

She was sweet to the other people and continued to speak to me with contempt, even though I continued to apologize for my mistake. I was flustered. Ripping my paperwork and not knowing where to go. Soon the others in front of me were served. It was my time to smile but to be honest, I was so embarrassed and concerned they were going to remove me as a security threat, I knew that wasn’t going to be possible.

Then the weirdest thing happened the lady switched from harsh to calm, saying she needed to yell at me for the camera on the ceiling or she would face consequences. (What? That’s bizarre.) It was tough to trust the nice demeanor, was she going to snap at me again if I made another mistake?

At that point, I was introvert drained from the drama, and wanted to hide. My posture could not hide my internal feelings as I sat down in front of the camera. Flash, the first picture snapped displaying a red-faced blank expression. She offered me a retake and snap, and a turtle-necked miserable-looking photo appeared on screen. I believe she offered me another retake but my mind was far away.

I continued to make mistakes, including selecting Arabic on my screen to fill out a few more things for completion. As she handed me my card, she apologized finally for scaring me, which I appreciated and I wished her a good day. I looked at my ID card and was horrified, the person doesn’t even look like me. The bottom half of the image is stretched out, compared to my photo from 2017 it looks like I aged and let myself go from how distorted the image is from what I saw on the screen.

It was the cherry bomb on top of the 2025 battle: DMV vs. Shy Girl.

I’ve tried to remind myself that what is important is that I did it, I didn’t cry when shouted at, and I didn’t give into my anxiety and bail. I did it and persevered, the bad picture happened but it doesn’t reflect what I actually look like and no one is really going to see it. But dang, what an awful experience! I think why the new picture feels like such a jump scare is it is all my fears wrapped up into one – aging and looking ugly and fat. My culture is obsessed with thinness and beauty. Plastic surgery is becoming normalized and it is sickening how vain we all are becoming. I forgot to do my hair, I didn’t wear foundation just a little eyeliner, and I forgot to gua sha.

The picture was just me and things out of my control like getting scolded, bad lighting, and a stretched image created something without beauty, because beauty is not the goal for the DMV, it is clinical and for the process of identification. It is a stark contrast to the world of filters, good lighting, and curated perfection fed to us in this current age. Seeing that ugly image, rocked my confidence because even though I find my worth in Christ, I still live in this fallen world that equates beauty and youth with virtue and worth. So what happens when life happens and time passes? We become older, we gain weight and no longer look like the size 2 self from our teen years?

Is everything past that point worthless? I realized, as I looked at the image of my expired license and the new one that having the same picture for two renewals, warped my view of how I am aging. The younger version also was far more curated as a coping mechanism. I used to be a stickler for straightening my hair, wearing makeup, jewelry, and food restriction to be in the beauty standard to blend in, like an outer shell. Protective, candy-coated.

But the younger version of myself would have been unable to cope with a stranger yelling at me without crying and shutting down. Any picture of myself I saw as ugly, I had no confidence even at my skinniest. All the things that have happened since 2017 – loss of loved ones, getting shunned by family members, reconnecting with my dad and his family only to get hurt again, losing my place to live, having nowhere to live, and crashing in people’s guest rooms for a few weeks, moving to Georgia and back, subsequent moves out of sketchy landlord situations, my first job, my first layoff in a global pandemic, etc.

It’s been a lot and through that process, I grew character and began to unmask. So what if I don’t look the same as I did in 2017? I thought I looked ugly and fat in my 2017 ID photo and was ashamed. It’s just a photo on a driver’s license card. I like the person God has shaped me to be more now in 2024, than the person who was lost and far from God in 2017. Cheers to growth!

2025 Intentions

Have you ever watched one of the Top Gear UK challenges, from the good old days of Clarkson, May, and Hammond?

The amphibious cars, DIY caravans, lorry drivers, hot-hatchbacks, cheap Porsches, etc. There is one thing in common. There is a scoreboard, the points make no sense, it’s all a big laugh, and on that terrible disappointment, it’s time to end.

This is what I equate growing an Instagram was like in 2024.

I did the things. I’ve made many pieces of content across stories, reels, and posts. I’ve sewn and knit a varied amount of things. I’ve done silly trends, serious reviews, inspirational posts, filmed tutorials, recorded thoughtful voice overs, and participated in the “add yours” cards on stories.

I turned on metrics. I carefully analyzed posting times, consistently shared things to keep engagement up, took breaks to avoid spamming, carefully thought of 3-second hooks, transcribed subtitles, filmed artistic shots, and agonized over lighting. I networked, supported other creators, and tried to make genuine connections. Got burned a few times by people who only interacted with me for the follow and stopped talking to me and following me after months of supporting them. It’s tricky making friends on that platform. Connections are either amazing, lovely people, or not at all. I met several lovely people too, it wasn’t all bad.

I ended the year with higher engagement, more friends, and negative or neutral growth depending on the refresh. The metrics contradict themselves constantly. I’ve lost as many followers as I’ve gained. I’ve learned I had ghost followers who were keeping my engagement low. I also had accounts following me that left the platform through Meta’s deactivation due to idleness. It’s one of the worst algorithms, showing your followers your posts days after you share them. Zuckerberg, do better.

I ended 2024 feeling like I was on a Top Gear challenge. Meta added and subtracted points to my metrics total willy nilly, like Richard Hammond getting minus “exactly the points he had” so that he ends with naught. It was nonsensical and mind-boggling. This platform provides no satisfaction in what you accomplish.  I got one point here, minus a thousand there, 20 points for this task – yada, yada, yada.

So 2025, what am I doing with my time? What am I working towards? I am going to write more and move on from growing an Instagram account to open a shop. Not interested anymore. It’s not happening and I think it’s a blessing. Fiber art creation is going back to being a hobby. I’m not going to be a fashion designer, or a pattern designer, or a sewing educator, or a part of fixing fashion. I am going to make things I like and have fun, and share what I want where I choose for the fun of it. I have a backlog of projects that I haven’t shared here because of the distraction of Instagram. I am looking forward to writing more, new things, and celebrating the victory of finishing the Udal Cuain manuscript. Available to peruse here. I’m going to do art, I’m going to garden, to bake, learn things, and work hard. I’m excited about it. The key intention is to focus on fulfillment over productivity, and when my to-do list is crossed off to feel fulfilled, not productive.

What are your plans or goals for 2025?

Slow It Down, Make It Bouncy

I think the only thing bouncy here is me feeling like I’m bouncing off the walls of my creative box after setting a goal in 2024. This goal was to get serious about my sewing and knitting Instagram account, use the creator metric tools, and learn how to use my digital marketing background to create engagement.

The Focus

I wanted a lifestyle change, an actual commitment to taking this seriously and it has worked. Follower count is a garbage stat on Instagram as mine hops around like a binkying rabbit, but engagement, interactions, and reach have been insightful tools to see how this can grow and what I should be working towards.

Now that it is Q4, um, I am creatively burnt out. So many reels, so much video recording, so many moments having to stare at my own face and body because I am the model, and try not to get body dysmorphia or feel self-absorbed. Yikes it messes with the head. The way some pieces of content have huge runs of traffic and some fall flat must be what it feels like to find the crab and miss the crab on the same string of pots. It’s wild.

My Internal Monologue

I spend time tracking and comparing one piece of content against another one that performed better on a different day or was posted at the same hour, so why did it perform differently? Did I use the right tags? How do I capture the same magic in a new piece of content? Should I use a formula for my pictures or videos? Oh no! Am I one note? How do I mix it up? Was that the right song? Should I create more content with trendy sounds? Was it my hair? Is it because I haven’t painted my sewing room yet? If I paint it a color I like will it perform better or worse? Should I paint it a sad beige? No that’s insane.

I miss the days of making content that didn’t feature my face, or my designs, and was not solely based on my own deadlines. But I hated that job?! Why do I miss the days of launching that Employee App or writing for an internal corporate magazine that was employee propaganda? I think its the artistic blues mixed with the echo chamber of the algorithim. When I get stuck in the metrics and the trends, I’ve noticed I have blinders to the things that are going well. Instead of appreciating any person who takes the time to watch my reels or like my posts, I refuse to let myself feel happiness.

It’s really unhealthy. It’s killing my mindset and keeping me from feeling inspired to create or to write. I’m just bottling it all up because I’m embarrassed of how this is getting to me. I feel silly. And because I am building something, and don’t feel like I have something to show for it, even though I do because it is on the internet. But how else in 2024 can you reach people in our world of technological disruption to our sense of community? So its not silly. It is work and can lead to something.

Wake Up

It’s time I creatively refresh and slow down. I’ve accomplished my goal of making it a habit and learning how to grow engagement. It’s time to shift gears. It’s October and I’ve barely written a piece of fiction or poetry. My artistic practice has slowed, my sketchbook gathering dust. What about Japanese, Korean, and the language of the piano? So dusty.

How about my goal to knit socks? It’d be nice to try at least one before 2025.

So as October, November, and December stretch out to the horizon, I’m looking forward to finishing this year strong and with renewed purpose. This blog is for all my hobbies; unfortunately, sewing is my coping mechanism. And when that landlord said we had to buy or get out, I went into a full-on sewing spiral.

It’s been a fun time. I’ve sewn so much more than I’ve even had the time to share on Instagram or the blog. It’s starting to get lost, all those moments, with haste instead of being shared with patience and proper love.

So I’m going to start. This afternoon I sat down and learned how to play the beginning of Für Elise. Tomorrow I hope to write and to feel free to create slowly. To be intentional with my time and pull my mind back into writing and the things I want to write about in my heart. Maybe some yoga thrown in there too.

#50 – Irish Landscapes

My go-to inspiration in high school was this daily calendar my mom had in her office. Each day featured a photograph from a scene in Ireland, and each day, at the end of the day, my mom would bring the paper home and give me the photograph to draw from. Before the days of Pinterest and Instagram, it was a bit tricky to find beautiful images to practice with. There were magazines of course and books, not to mention literally the world around you, but this was a game changer to get daily inspiration. In the 2000s, it was before the supremacy of the touchscreen smartphone with apps galore and fantastic cameras to snap photos in that you could carry around in your pocket. If you took photos for inspiration, you had to print them and it was not cheap. Printing even on printer paper was not cheap and trust me, parents did not like us wasting ink.

This is a taste of what the images featured via a modern source – Unsplash.

What is special to me about the framed image above is that I didn’t frame it. My grandparents did. It was a piece that I guess spoke to them and they framed it and hung it in their bedroom. Something I didn’t appreciate at the time, as a moody teenager I was embarrassed by it. Now in 2024, it hangs in the hallway outside my bedroom and when I see it hanging there proudly in its frame I remember how much they believed in my art, my writing, my fashion sense. I wish I could show them all that I am doing now. I think they would be proud.

Making Art From A Nightmare

I was inspired to explore my feelings about this dream and nightmare from a YouTube video I watched by Electra Dashwood. You should check it out!

Tropical Travel Vlogger Trunk

This Fashion Polly-esque playset-looking trunk may look cute and fantastical, but in my dream, it was full of pure nightmares. This dream sequence was so vivid I woke feeling like my life was falling apart, all because of this Pandora’s box. Definitely the effect of some stressful personal situations I had in my life at the time. I’ve been feeling waves of anxiety lately. Although I deeply disliked this trunk in my dream, in art form I wish I had this little gem to store my fabric because it is delightfully bright and vivid. This was drawn in chalk pastel in February 2024.

Cloud Drawing Messenger

This was another odd dream, with my dad, whom I don’t often dream about because I honestly don’t have that many memories with him. After a big boundary breakthrough, I had this dream in which my dad would only communicate with me through watercolor clouds expressing his emotions about what I shared. This was such a cool dream because usually all my dad and I do if we have an emotional conversation, it is in anger and yelling. But this dream was delicate and uplifting. We communicated, and I wish this dream had been real life. The clouds were recreated in chalk pastel in December 2023.

#47 – Goodbye February

This month has straight up stunk. It was a pinball of coming off those allergic reactions I mentioned in #45 – Allergy and Winter Winds, coming down with a cold or a cold, getting better, having an allergic reaction to my eyeshadow, getting another cold, discovering my body wash and loofah combo was giving me irritation, in the form of friction hives, and having to stop drinking camomille to get the hives to go away. I was stuck in this loop of discouragement and I definitely let it live in my mind leading to worry and feeling stuck, basically, like this gif when Kim and Ron switch bodies because of Drakken’s body-switching machine. It was one flip to another flop, nothing progressing, just stuck.

That is life, it kicks our butts, leaves us discouraged, and some days feel like a bunch of little things going wrong are going to give us death by a thousand paper cuts. But honestly, that’s part of the journey of existence. Life does not give us any guarantees that each day is going to be sunshine and rainbows, some days are like a tsunami, and other days are like tripping, repeatedly. I’m thankful that it was only a bunch of small little things breaking my focus, instead of one of those big things that shake us to our core. As a highly sensitive person, I can let the little things swirl around in my head until they are big, shakeable problems that tower over me. These little setbacks taught me something pretty important, I need people in my life. I crave it more than my introverted nature is willing to admit.

On those days, when I felt frustrated and down, lost in the worry of my own head, the thing that pulled me back to the light were people. They helped me remember that I wasn’t alone, but instead that I am loved and needed by others in return. There is purpose and worth in the person I am in being there for others in my life.

It was the small things, Kyle taking care of me when I was feeling really crumby, like asking if I had taken medicine or refilling my water bottle before I realized it was empty. Him doing the dishes, cooking dinner, and making me tea in the morning as I was super slow pulling myself out of bed. Those are huge when you are feeling sick and he is so patient with me. Or my neighbor, who texted me one morning because our Amazon packages got mixed up, remembering she is next door and always there if I need a friend. A phone conversation with a friend, talking about anything or nothing, but the connection of catching up after a while and spending time in that bubble together is such a refreshing reset. Having one of those low-maintenance friendships where she texts me out of the blue and we spend time catching up writing digital letters to each other until the conversation fades, knowing we’ll pick it back up later on. Admitting to my mom that I was scared because she was having complications from her surgery this past summer, saying the fear aloud and facing that I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. A quick chat with my stepdad, talking nonsense but having a blast doing it. My brother-in-law video calling me out of the blue to catch up as we both cook dinner.

Those little moments of community, pull me out of the funk I was in faster than I realized. We really need people. This modern life is lonely. If nothing else, from this month, I learned how dissatisfied I am with the digital barriers there are to the community and how I don’t want to settle anymore. Because people matter and we need them even if we get peopled out easily. Goodbye, February, my relentless gremlin and ironically, the frank teacher I needed.

Winter Light

A jolt of life. A bright, warm, hope!

Vast blue sky, a wash of cerulean lifts above my head.

All worries, fade. Care melts from my shoulders.

A hope for tomorrow! Truth breaks through the lies.

Darkness lasts for a moment but life springs forth

to sunshine’s embrace. A welcome friend.

You comfort my soul and invigorate my mind!

Welcome home, welcome back, bright, blue sky.

Dark Winter

Rosy, golden haze breaks through the greige. Dark, lifeless sky.

I miss the sun on my pale, blue eyes.

The sun on my face? A vampire’s disgrace!

Winter is finally getting to me.

The wind has whipped, into the ether

and clouds slip, like a blip, and slide away into gray nothing monotone before I can comprehend.

I dream of snow. I dream of the sun. The crunch of cool.

November rain, December shadows, January freeze, this nightmare will not end.

Skipping Stitches

Skipping stitches, a court of witches has taken my needle by storm.

Stretch knit slips. Stretch knit slips!?

Another scarred and tattered hem.

Gremlins in the machine? I think I’m going to steam!

From my face, the anger boiling in my heart…

Was this project doomed from the start?

Selkie Dresses and the AI-Generated Backlash

People are ticked off regarding Selkie’s use of AI in their Valentine’s Day release, and I have to say, I can see their point! (Also, cupid, again? What is up with these dramatic “love-inspired” releases for 2024?)

Selkie made a creative, design choice. A big choice that may not have been the wisest decision for their brand reputation. As of three days after the announcement, the comment section is not pleased by the decision to use AI-developed patterns for their fabric instead of human artists to develop patterns for their newest crop of iconic dresses. 

Now, right off the bat for me, I can see a contradiction in this decision just from an aesthetic standpoint. Selkie is a dress brand that took off in popularity in 2020, selling fantasy puff romantic dresses that evoke another time. They are fanciful, sometimes with corsetted bodices, other times they have high regency waistlines, but mostly they look like a dress to galavant around Versailles in with Marie Antoinette. They are not modern in the dream they sell, they have an intrinsic historical imagination. 

They are princess dresses. Ladies of prestige in the modern time when none of them feel like princesses. Since the 1990s, we have seen a steep decline in formal fashion in our day-to-day life. Case in point, billionaire tech boys wear hoodies and t-shirts, not suits and hats like Carnegie and Vanderbilt. In 2020, this came to a head as remote work and social distancing created a new space of absolute nothingness when it came to fashion.

What was the point? You could wear pajamas and as long as you weren’t on a Zoom call, who would know? It was negligible. With face coverings, makeup became superfluous. Selkie, cottage-core, dark academia, etc. These movements in fashion revealed something deeper in our collective psyche. Although wearing pajamas and hanging out on our couches seemed like a dream, in reality, we were missing the fantasy of spectacle and splendor. Selkie is the typification of this. 

AI pops the dream bubble. Suddenly the clouds of tulle and puff sleeves that carried us into a dream world of palaces, picnics, and girlhood, evaporate underneath us and the lifestyle falls back to reality. As much as AI sells a dream of fantasy, it is a tool of reality. The reality of cutting corners, fast fashion, and jobs being cut from creatives is to cut costs because AI is cheaper. But cheaper is not always cheerful. In the case of a lot of AI art and AI work, you are getting what you pay for. It’s not the real deal, something is just a bit off. 

I’ve watched several videos in 2023 of creators I watch putting AI to the test, and in each case when it came to AI having to work in our space, in the humanities, it couldn’t hang. The results were surreal, not real. In these videos, AI was used to interpret history, recreate art in a historical style, create portraits in photography, show examples of historical dress, and give advice on how to give yourself a makeover. In each experiment, the AI was not able to replicate the human experience and seemed to get confused by things involving the story of humans. 

With Selkie’s historical aesthetic being a key to its branding, it is not surprising to me that AI seems out of the aesthetic wheelhouse. This is an interesting reaction to me because it has appeared since the turn of the 20th century that we as humans have been lusting over technology as the ultimate fantasy until we have it and then the intoxication fades away like blood alcohol and late-night attraction. 

It is an interesting time for fashion brands for sure because I think this may be the era that humanness and authenticity to the world the brand is selling may prove to be more valuable than gold. I appreciate the commitment to humanness and personal ethics that consumers are voicing. Especially when it comes to human artists. We can’t change the fact that AI is a thing and it is easy to replace humans with technology, all we can do is voice our opinion and make choices based on what we believe.

I’ve looked through the comments on Selkie’s newest release and there were echoes of disappointment and displeasure from consumers, a lot of them being artists themselves. There was a different tone in these comments than the commonplace cancel culture of our current age, there was genuine sadness. Like when a parent isn’t mad, just disappointed.

The criticism was delivered respectfully but firmly. This gave me hope that we can begin discussing things online with more frankness and kindness than in recent years. If you are a big proponent of AI, I ask dear reader that you don’t take my thoughts on the subject of AI personally. Maybe you can be the one to show us all what makes it great? 🙂

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