The Ink Doesn't Lie
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Personal / Process
The Ink
Doesn't
Lie
On art, a hard winter, and what happens when the thing keeping you afloat isn't quite enough on its own.
My mom was a photographer. An incredible one — the kind whose work deserved walls, archives, recognition. She never got that credit during her lifetime. One of the quiet missions I carry is to change that: to digitize her archive, to share what she made, to give her legacy the visibility it was always owed.
She died six years ago. I'm an only child. A momma's boy, through and through, and I'll say that without embarrassment. When she died, the panic attacks came. They stayed for over a year — grief doing what grief does, finding every nerve it can reach. And then, slowly, they stopped. Six years of quiet. Long enough that I almost forgot they were something that happened to me.
This winter, they came back.
§ 01 — The winter
Minneapolis had a polar vortex this year. If you weren't here, I don't know how to fully explain what that does to a city — to daily life, to your body, to your ability to just get through the basic mechanics of existing. My car broke down. Got beaten up by the cold in ways I'm still dealing with. Drives that should be routine became their own small ordeals.
And around me, people I love were struggling. My best friend was going through serious trouble. Family members were dealing with health issues. Neighbors were bickering — the kind of small, bitter conflict that happens when everyone is cold and stressed and grinding against each other over things that genuinely do not matter. The cumulative weight of it all found a point to pick at. And slowly, without fully realizing it was happening, I no longer knew what to do on my own.
That is saying something. I've been in difficult situations. Most things don't faze me. But this winter got on my nerves in a way I wasn't prepared for.
It found a point to pick at — and I no longer knew what to do on my own.
The panic attacks came at unexpected moments. Not during the hard parts, necessarily. Sometimes in the quiet after. Sometimes triggered by something ordinary that my nervous system had decided to treat as a threat. That's the thing about panic — it doesn't always follow logic. It just arrives.
§ 02 — What kept me going
I was designing. I was printing. I was making posters.
Art reminds me that I'm alive — not in a poster-on-the-wall sense, but literally. It gives the day a direction. Without it, life becomes drudgery, just moving through time. With it, you're inside something. That distinction matters more than I can easily explain.
But I want to be honest about something, because this isn't a story about art saving me: you can stay engaged in creative work all day — hours designing, hours running prints, absorbed in composition and color and message — and feel completely held by it. And then you stop. And whatever you'd been keeping at bay is right there waiting. The art didn't make the hard things disappear. Sometimes it just kept me company while I figured out what to do next.
There's a difference between distraction and healing. I know that now more clearly than I did in October.
§ 03 — The expired tabs poster
Here's the story I keep coming back to.
I made a poster about expired license plate tabs — a frustration that's personal and local and specific to what it feels like to navigate this city while being watched for small infractions. I entered it late to Art You Hearts Ice Out, a protest poster art show at CanCan Wonderland. Past the deadline. I basically talked my way in, offering to print some late entries for Nikki, who organized it.
She saw the expired tabs poster and told me it had to be part of the show.
It was. And after — people sought me out. Strangers came and told me how much that piece meant to them. How it said something they recognized. How it was special.
I didn't make that poster to be in a show. I made it because I was frustrated and I had a printer and I had something to say. That's the only way I know how to make work that lands: make it because it's true, not because it's strategic.
My mom worked the same way. She photographed what she saw, what mattered, what was real. She wasn't performing for an audience. She was documenting something. And the work was extraordinary — and mostly unseen in her lifetime. I think about that a lot when I'm printing.
§ 04 — Local vs. everywhere
The anti-ICE movement in Minneapolis connected me to something I needed this winter: evidence that people are genuinely good. That in the middle of all the difficulty — the cold, the stress, the conflict — there are people striving to do their best for those around them. Showing up for strangers. Being real.
That's what protest work does at its best. It finds the people who still give a damn and puts them in the same room.
The internet can reach everywhere. A poster reaches here — this block, this neighborhood, the people you're actually trying to coexist with. There's something about physical work existing in the physical world that digital work can't replicate. A post disappears into the feed. A poster on the corner is still there in the morning. Someone saw it on the way to work and felt something. Maybe they don't know who made it. That's fine. It was made. It exists. It's out in the world doing something.
When I was at my lowest this winter, that physicality mattered. Making something real — tangible, intentional, present — was proof that I was still here too.
§ 05 — The honest part
I'm back in therapy.
Art didn't cure what this winter brought. But it kept me functional, connected, and making something while I got my footing back. It gave me strangers who recognized something I'd made and felt seen because of it. It reminded me that my mom's instinct — to make things, to document what's real, to put something true into the world — was worth carrying forward.
Archiving her photographs is something I'm just beginning. It's slow work, and that's intentional. My Grandma gave me the wisdom to take this process slow and really enjoy it, rather than feel the need to hurry up and get it done. That feels like the right way to honor her. And it feels like the reason I ended up behind a large-format printer in Minneapolis, making posters for movements she would have photographed.
If you make things and you're also struggling: the work doesn't have to save you to matter. Sometimes it just needs to keep you company while you figure out how to save yourself.
Keep making the thing.