I need to tell you about last night, because if I pretended it went well, I’d be lying to you… and we don’t do that here.
It started with a two-hour and twenty-four minute leadership meeting. The first twenty minutes of which I discovered that the CRM dashboard I designed, the one I handed our CTO a 35-page schema document for, the one I built from scratch as his working blueprint? Francisco is testing it. Francisco, who I finished training in the basics of hedge fund operations approximately two weeks ago. He has a login. I don’t.
I spent the remaining two hours and four minutes on mute, doing my actual work, and quietly fantasizing about other career paths.
So. You can imagine the emotional state I was in when I got off that call.
But here’s the thing. I had a plan for the evening. A good one. Hopeful, even.
My UV resin starter kit had arrived.
If you’re not familiar, UV resin crafts involve pouring clear resin into small molds, placing tiny decorative elements inside, curing it with a UV light, and ending up with what is essentially a beautiful miniature jewel. Little necklace pendants. Tiny keychains. Adorable things.
I do Dutch pour painting and I genuinely enjoy it. It’s messy and forgiving and big. I had allowed myself to believe this would be similar. More delicate, sure. But in the same spirit.
Reader, it was not in the same spirit.
I read the instructions. I poured the resin into the mold. I brought it to the edges like a reasonable adult. I cured it with the light. No problems. Feeling good. Dare I say… confident?
Then I had to add the flowers.
The little dried flowers. You pick them up with tweezers, place them on the resin, and they become part of this lovely preserved piece. Simple. Obvious. Clearly doable.
The tweezers had a different agenda entirely.
These were the special spring-loaded kind that came in the kit and I want you to understand: they operated in direct opposition to every known law of tweezer physics. Squeeze them and they opened. Release them and they closed. Did they do either of these things on command? Absolutely not. Did they pick up what I asked them to pick up? No. Did they put things down where I wanted them to go? Never. At one point a tiny dried petal ended up in a completely different mold across the table and I genuinely do not know how.
I lost a petal. Mid-air. Somewhere between “I have this” and “where did it go.”
I gave it grace. I tried several more pieces. The bubbles in the resin mocked me. The jump ring that needed to go through the finished piece required fifteen minutes of plier-based negotiations that I will not be repeating. And at the end of an hour and a half, I sat back and looked at what I had made.
It was not good. I would not show it to anyone. Including my dog.
Here’s what I want to say to you, though.
I don’t share my Dutch pour paintings because they’re perfect. I share them because they bring me joy while I’m making them. That is the entire point of a creative outlet after fifty. Not the product. The process.
UV resin did not bring me joy. It brought me frustration in a very small format, which is almost worse than large-scale frustration because at least with Dutch pour you feel like you’re doing something. With resin you’re hunched over a table in reading glasses trying to coax a dried chamomile petal into a mold the size of a thumbnail. For an hour and a half. After a two-hour meeting about your own work being given to someone else.
That is not joy. That is punishment.
The kit is going to my granddaughter, who does nails and has the precision, patience, and probably better tweezers than I do. She will probably make something gorgeous. I hope she does. That’s genuinely where this belongs.
And I’m going back to my pour paintings, which are loud and free and never once require tweezers.
If you have ever ordered a starter kit in a moment of creative ambition and then sat with the finished product thinking “well that’s not going up anywhere,” you are in excellent company. This is what finding your creative outlet actually looks like. It’s not arriving at the thing fully formed. It’s trying the resin, cursing at the pliers, shipping the kit to someone who will love it, and going back to what actually fills you up.
Not everything is your medium. Finding out what isn’t is part of the work.
The blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut. Last night was not that night. And honestly? I’m fine with that.
