Dear Maker,
I'm going to get a bit vulnerable here.
If you’re a maker or creative who has found your way here, I want to thank you. Not just for finding me, and offering me the trust of your attention - but for doing one of the most deeply human things we can do for one another. For making.
As a kid growing up in an abusive home, I found refuge in making and in fellow makers.
I tucked myself safely into sketchpads and writing notebooks to process and to hold on to myself. And through the work of makers, I could also slip away to far-off lands, hobbit holes, and magic schools. These brought moments of hope and wonder into my life that reached right through the isolation. The characters in those stories showed me that I could not only survive trauma, but come out the other side without losing my kindness, or my rebellion.
Somewhere in those years of hurt and healing, I fell in love with art, writing, and people - with our stories, our capacity for love, and for healing and wonder. I later found purpose in supporting fellow survivors, and eventually earned my PhD in Counseling Psychology. I've spent over a decade as a trauma therapist, meeting people at the hardest points of their stories, and I have never stopped being in awe with how truly lovely we are.
And yet, while therapy is so very important, it isn’t the first thing that saves us. Making is.
I wonder how the things you are making might reach some stranger right when they need it most. Every story, song, painting, and carefully designed thing is a little note left from one human to another. They’re how we reach each other. And how we can be reached, even in the hardest points.
Person after person, survivor after survivor, has shared those moments with me. Of what they held onto. Things that kept them going. Things that helped them realize that they could ask for help at all.
As a child, I was saved first by Ella of Frell, a farmboy from Tattoine, Samwise the gardener, Katniss from the Seam, just Harry, and characters and worlds of my own making.
So many of us have felt held by certain characters, certain songs, and certain works from makers we’ll never meet - and how those were some of the first proof we had that we weren’t alone. That somewhere, someone else felt this too.
There was a marble woman, too. As a child, I remember standing in front of Raffaello Monti’s Veiled Lady at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her veil and face looked so soft, like it could lift in a breeze, and yet it was solid stone. I remember just starting and staring at the sculpture, and feeling like someone had managed to make magic. It was a person, over a century ago, who had patiently polished marble differently in different places until stone could imitate something hidden and soft beneath.
And lastly, I think of the tapestry I loved at my grandparents’ house. When there was chaos at home and I was left in their care, I’d sit in the quiet, by this larger than life tapestry. It was hand embroidered in India generations ago. When my family came to America, they had to leave a lot behind, but they carried this tapestry with them. It was also one of the few physical things I carried with me into my life now. I can see it from my desk, where I’m typing this letter to you.
Making can reach beyond us, our language, and even our lifetime. And when we experience these, we carry them with us - sometimes literally.
Through Making, we can share parts of ourselves, our senses, and our humanity, like sending our roots out in the world to intertwine with the roots of fellow humans.
That's why I want to dedicate this whole site and work to makers and the making that connects us. Beneath the Making is my love letter to makers like you.
I sincerely hope something here finds you in a moment when you need it. Whatever you’re making, and wherever you are in that - I’m glad it exists. And I’m glad you exist.
With warmth and love,
Jackie