I’m sitting 4,000 miles away, watching the city I love through a screen.
For weeks, my days were swallowed by doom-scrolling — refreshing feeds, scanning headlines, bracing for the next alert. It’s a particular kind of helplessness, being so far from the people and streets that shaped you while you watch events unfold in real time. My daughter lives and works near Eat Street. My little sister was tear-gassed on January 24th. Friends scattered across neighbourhoods I know like the back of my hand are doing what they can, when they can. Every notification lands like a jolt.
Distance doesn’t soften worry. It sharpens it. You’re left holding all that care with nowhere for it to land.
Then something shifted.
One of my sisters suggested a collaborative quilt to submit to the Minnesota State Fair. And me — with nowhere constructive to channel all my pent-up everything — took that seed and ran with it. Or at least ran with the idea of building a website for it.
Ironically, we may not even be able to submit it. The Minnesota State Fair doesn’t always accept group entries, and textile collaboration doesn’t neatly fit into established categories. That feels… familiar. But whether it hangs on a wall or not, the work of making it together already matters.
Before I go further, I need to do a privilege check and acknowledge the obvious: I am safe. I am technically unemployed — my artwork is apparently too expensive for anyone to buy — but I have a husband who is also my best friend, and he has held me steady while I try to figure out how to make a life in an art world that still dismisses textile labour as “craft.” (Never mind that one piece took 1,176 hours — forty-six solid days of work.)
What I am trying to say is: I am lucky. Beyond lucky.
Which makes it harder to admit how long it took me to really register what was happening back home.
I’d spent the last year avoiding the news. If my husband started to tell me something the fascist on Pennsylvania Avenue had done, I would stop him mid-sentence. I hid in true crime podcasts, time-travel audiobooks, and the looping question of what I am doing professionally — which, at the time, felt like nothing at all.
It wasn’t until Renée Good was murdered that it finally broke through. A woman killed minutes from my last address in Minneapolis — and that was what made it real? I am still struggling with that, and I suspect I will for quite some time.
Something cracked open.
Then Alex Pretti was murdered minutes from where my daughter lives. My sister went to stand as a witness observer at 26th & Nicollet. She sent a video. I could hear the fear in my brother-in-law’s voice when he lost sight of her. I saw the chemical dispersal vehicle. They were tear-gassed.
That night, as people gathered in neighbourhoods across the city to light candles, I sat outside in my pyjamas in the unseasonably mild air of the Scottish central belt and switched on every LED candle we own because real ones won’t survive the wind tunnel we call home.
It felt absurd. It felt tragic. It also felt necessary.
The Patchwork of Resistance has given me somewhere to put that energy — not to escape fear, but to metabolise it. Instead of spiralling through updates I can’t control, I’ve been teaching myself WordPress, writing, organising, and hoping to build something alongside others who feel the same pull toward action.
Despite the endless screentime of learning an editing platform that oft-times feels anathema to anything that makes sense, there is a kind of steadiness in this making. A rhythm that interrupts the incessant panic, and an agency that’s been returning with each keystroke.
I am still worried. I still check the news more than I should.
But now there is also this:
a collective space where care becomes generative,
where distance does not mean disconnection,
and where making becomes a way of staying present with the people and places I love.
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