Have you survived January?

Looming threats became concrete with the inauguration last week and the subsequent blizzard of executive orders that have not ceased since then. Despair creeps in throughout the days in direct correlation to the amount of social media I consume, but I keep my head down for the most part, chipping away at work.

That Monday I spent in the studio, listening to classic rock very loud, throwing out my plans for the day in lieu of cleaning a gunked-up ink overflow situation in my fluorescent orange drum for the second time within the week— and believe me it’s not lost on me that on this day of all days it was the orange drum being a little whiny baby.

But then, it always is the orange drum, because fluorescent ink for whatever reason is prone to getting really viscous and not playing nice, especially in colder temperatures. And it was cold that week. Siberian winds were blasting across the South in a rogue polar vortex, something the jet stream is supposed to contain but of course the jet stream is fucked. 

I wore long johns under sweatpants for three days straight and rarely left the comfort of the studio’s heated floor mat. The cats took refuge with me in the studio, Nadine on her own little heated biscuit of a bed and Stuart tucked cozily in a fluffy donut under the hot air of the space heater. 

I pinned a blanket around the climbing jasmine in the garden, tucking tendrils underneath the fabric to cut the freezing wind across the jasmine leaves. We all found warmth in ways we knew how.

The jasmine has survived. 

Meanwhile I print and score and fold and sleeve cards, thousands of cards, getting ready to send another pallet of restocks to the warehouse, even though didn’t I just do that a few weeks ago? I did. It’s a good problem to have of course, and I feel grateful.

Learning the cadence of manufacturing in the months since I partnered with Shipfluence to take care of my warehousing and fulfillment has been challenging. As soon as I get a bunch of things out the door it seems it is time to turn around and do it all again. I shouldn’t be, but I am continuously surprised by the success of my stationery line and the frequency at which I’m selling out of items.

There’s always something that needs restocking, needs reordering. The pallet of paper I’ve been expecting for weeks was not delivered as scheduled, twice. Something that needs a decision to be made. It’s the constant decision-making that gets exhausting. For everything that goes wrong a decision must be made as to how to correct course. How to achieve the goal of the day, the goal of the hour.

Time goes quickly and slowly.

“Have you survived January?” We ask each other in memes with a chuckle, but truly, why is January so relentless?

I sat out the winter tradeshows but I did participate in a virtual one. A bevy of orders (thank you kind retailers who stocked up) have been swiftly fulfilled and my inventory depleted. Again! More restocks on the way, I’m doing as much as I can! 

I’ve been telling myself that my own pace is OK, that slowness is acceptable and that I needn’t make myself sick over getting some cards to a warehouse one day faster. Capitalism has taught us to hustle at all costs but what if we didn’t? 

What if I didn’t send an email to my email list every single week and what if I didn’t get around to posting on Instagram and what if I don’t launch all those new products right now and maybe just take my time to get everything squared away instead of rushing to fill a quota?

When I worked at the theater and things were going pear-shaped, one of my old coworkers used to say, “We entertain people for a living.” Yes, the show must go on, but it wasn’t life or death. And I like to remind myself of this because, while I believe in the power of theater to uplift the human experience in much the same way I believe greeting cards can do the same, it isn’t in fact life or death on the tangible side of things. You not being able to order some cards because they are out of stock for a few weeks is not life or death. 

And that’s the vibe I want to take with me into 2025. Lord knows there are plenty of things in the world right now that are much more life or death than stationery. It’s OK to take my time creating things. You can’t rush creativity. And when the bug bites, when you get the spark to draw a silly little cat while you should be sleeving cards, you draw the cat. The sleeving can wait. Lasso the spark while it’s there because it won’t always be. But there will always be more cards to sleeve.

Days are getting longer, and this is the mantra I comfort myself when the rest of the world is falling apart. A basic fact that brings regularity to a dysregulated world: at the very least, the days continue to get longer and shorter in succession. There are fewer insects and more wildfires and fascism is on the rise globally, but every day the sun follows its elliptical path across the sky like it has for billions of years, up in the East and down in the West.

A cycle, I guess, a lot like the cycle of making cards and sending cards away and then making more cards and sending them away in turn. In and out, up and down, over and over forever and ever amen.