A grown-woman look at impulse spending, meaningful home decor, and why intentional art buying matters.
I didn’t grow up in a house full of stuff.
GenX kid. Out all day until dark. No supervision.
You kept your toys until they broke, taped them back together, and hoped for the best.
Or you turned a cardboard box into the My Little Pony stable you didn’t get for Christmas.
There wasn’t a lot to throw away because there wasn’t a lot to begin with. (Maybe that’s why I don’t want “stuff” anymore — I want things that actually mean something in my home.)
Somewhere along the line — adulthood, independence, survival mode — I started filling the void with things – and cats, lots of cats.
Little rewards.
Little comforts.
Little “I deserve this” purchases — the kind high-performing women reach for when they’re too busy holding everything together.
Just the slow drip of buying little comforts to fill the void that builds up when you spend years making yourself smaller — holding back your opinions so you don’t “cause a problem,” dialing down your intelligence so you don’t outshine anyone, keeping quiet to avoid backlash, and doing the emotional labor no one thanked you for.
It’s the kind of disappearing you learn young.
And by the time you’re an adult, you barely notice you’re doing it until you try to move houses.
Fast-forward to now.
We’re moving.
And until we’re settled by the water, the studio is carrying the overflow.
Furniture. Boxes. Life stacked everywhere.
Standing in the middle of those piles, I had a gut-punch moment. I looked at the “treats” I used to cope and thought:
“Wow. I paid money for all this… and now I’m begging people to take it off my hands.”
The dopamine hit fades. The bill doesn’t.
High-performing women buy a lot of little comforts to make up for the tax we pay — staying smaller, quieter, and more accommodating than we ever should have been.
And right on schedule, Black Friday is coming.
People are about to panic-buy a bunch of shit they’ll be sick of by January.
So before you hit checkout on anything this week, ask yourself:
Does this add anything to my life — or is it just another dopamine hit to soothe a void I didn’t create?
If it doesn’t spark anything real, walk away.
And if you are going to buy something, make it something made by a human— original artwork, luxury art, anything with actual intention behind it.
Something that earns a place in your home.
Not another box you drag into the next basement.
Which brings me to the art studio.
I had to get honest about what’s staying and what’s finding a new home.
Some of my earlier pieces — smaller, softer, more decor-forward — are solid.
But they’re from my “be-everything-to-everyone” phase.
They don’t fit the work I’m making now.
They don’t fit the grown-ass women who collect my work now — women who buy intentional art because it reflects who they are, not because it’s on sale. I’ve written more on intentional collecting here.
So they aren’t coming with me.
They deserve homes where they’ll actually be seen, not packed into storage because I’m too sentimental to let go.
So I’m releasing them into the wild. If you want to see the work I’m creating in this grown-woman chapter, you can find it here.
Not because it’s Black Friday — but because I need to make space with intention.
If something sparks something real, great.
If not, skip it.
If the only reason you want it is the discount, you don’t actually want it.
If you want first access to the space-making release, join my list. That’s where it shows up first.