It’s easy to want everything we do to be productive or valuable in an immediate way—like maybe I was going to discover some sort of profound but latent talent at forty-four years old and all of a sudden watercolor would be my life. That’s grind culture, hustle culture, productivity culture, that voice that tells us we are what we make, what other people can see, what we can monetize. I cannot monetize my watercolors. I can barely look at them. My kids even know that I’m terrible—they say, Oh, yeah, wow. I’m like, “Don’t oh, yeah, wow me.” I’ve been doing the oh, yeah, wow noises for nearly
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