Optimize less. Feel more.
May 2026 | Notes From The Studio | Issue 34
Thursday, May 21, 2026
8:57 AM, Home
Note: Wrote by hand then dictated to my Notes app for editing. Just in case you were wondering.
I just cleaned off my desk. It’s still full of dust and I have to wipe it down when I finish my coffee, but I managed to make it through piles of receipts, users guides, notes to myself ranging at least five years back, and other stuff that I can’t bother to list.
The thing that I most wanted to do this morning is what I’m doing right now – free writing, by hand. See what wants to come out.
Natalie Goldberg says I’m supposed to keep my hand moving, but sorry I have to stop and drink coffee. Plus it has been so long since I’ve written this much this quickly that I can feel a little cramp starting in my hand and wrist. But I also feel the kinetic energy of it – the quick movement of ink across the page, the energy running from my brain down my right arm and out through my fingers.
The sorcery of words.
It feels good to be sitting at a clean desk on a sunny spring weekday morning, allowing things to flow out like this. Feeling connected to my inner self. In relationship with my creativity. That’s the goal these days – to strengthen my relationship with my creativity. To allow things to be born from that place.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at myself and my work from the outside in – trying to optimize, trying to market, trying to “figure out”. Marketing Melanie has a huge hat that she defaults to putting on. But it’s time for her to put on something smaller – less sombrero, more baseball cap. Or at least one of those cute summer straw bucket hats that does its job without taking up an entire airline row.
Just now thinking of the photo I love of the model wearing nothing but a giant sun hat. Can’t find that one, but I also love the one below by Beste Zeybel.
Marketing Melanie understands the importance of her job, but she has just been doing it in an all-consuming way and she is ready to step back now. Artist Melanie is ready to wear the sombrero. Or at least this giant sun hat.
I love this hat analogy.
It may not look like it to the outside world, but Marketing Melanie has snuffed out some of Artist Melanie’s fire. And Artist Melanie is ready to reclaim it. She’s ready to cozy up right next to the flame.
As I said in a note that I wrote to myself last week, this is what I want my writing to be now: the fire to create myself, not market myself.
I realized that I had moved away from the fire, and that’s where the warmth is. The feeling.
Optimize less. Feel more.
Featured Print: To Be Free
Additional Notes
I’m currently rereading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I read this book for the first time in 2002, when I was really getting into writing and my goal for my life was to become a professional writer. I wanted to see what it feels like to read it again, a quarter of a century later, after becoming a professional writer, photographer, painter, and mother.
I remember this book meaning so much to me in those early stages of exploring my own creativity. This is one of the ways that I’m moving back toward my own creative fire. Revisiting what has nurtured it.
Last week I read and related to this post by David Sherry. I’ve spent way too much time thinking about optimization over the past few years and I’m ready to give it up.
What about you? Anything you’re feeling more drawn to lately? Anything you’ve noticed about yourself that you’re working on changing?
Thanks for being here.
— Melanie
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The title of this is very much my current state of mind.
I love this Melanie! Looking forward seeing how this unfolds for you.