Long Last, Long Lost
After graduating college and leaving the wonderful bubble I had created for myself, the certainty and comfort I had been so safe in dissolved almost overnight. What I expected to feel like arrival in adulthood and independence instead felt like collapse. The structure, spontaneity, and sense of security I had relied on disappeared. My body carried that loss. I became restless. I was aching, and utterly unsure of where to place myself next. Countless nights I spent staring at my ceiling wondering why my life had come to these moments.
By default, I ended up back in my childhood home and back in suburbia. Nearly every aspect of the neighborhood I grew up in I know all too well. There’s a crack on the sidewalk in front of my neighborhood pool where I once tripped and skinned my knee. The path leading up to my middle school is littered with the same fruit each spring. My neighbor hasn’t removed the blue frisbee from their roof. Nothing and yet everything has changed. Everyone lives the same life in my neighborhood. Each house has a husband that goes off to work at eight in the morning and back at six. Nearly every house has a child in school and plays a sport. Soccer mom minivans take up all the parking spots on the side of the road. And every day is the exact same.
Being surrounded by these remnants was devastating. Living back in my childhood home and neighborhood held evidence of who I once was and who I thought I would become, and standing between those two selves, I felt profoundly defeated. Returning home felt like regression and the familiarity of the space only sharpened my sense of failure.
I understood, logically, that many of the circumstances I was facing were out of my control. It was incredibly hard to allow myself grace in a transitional period that so many experience but few openly discuss. Yet understanding did not erase the emotional weight. The feeling of failure lingered and it was heavy and difficult to articulate. It washed over me in the stillness of my hometown. It overwhelmed me that effort does not always immediately translate into progress and what I thought was true, no longer applied to my experience anymore.
This body of work emerges from that emotional terrain. It is a visual and conceptual response to uncertainty, disappointment, and the fragile process of self-forgiveness. Through this project, I confront the tension between who I was, who I hoped to be, and who I am becoming. The work sits in the in-between space where nothing is resolved, but everything is felt. It acknowledges grief not for something lost, but for something that has yet to arrive.
I have come to perceive this time of my life as a waiting room for the next chapter. This project is an act of understanding. It allows me to sit with discomfort instead of rushing past it. I’m forced to face the unremarkable moments that make up the transition. By documenting and exploring these feelings of failure and stagnation, I am reclaiming agency over them. The work does not offer answers just yet. But it’s filled with honesty and vulnerability. In doing so, it reflects the reality of becoming.
