Dune Shack

*This entry is heavy. Grief, suicide, the things you carry into isolation when no one's watching. This is what the residency actually looks like right now. I'm not editing it out.*

The truth is my head isn't even here anymore.

Two weeks ago my friend Kevin jumped off a bridge and took his own life and ever since then I've been walking around trying to manufacture some resemblance of normal in a place where normal doesn't exist. I'm on an artist residency. Everyone sees the dunes, the ocean, the mythology of it all. The dreamy artist summer. The solitude. The work.

What they don't see is me sitting in silence with a thousand unanswered questions clawing holes through my head.

I hide it well. Too well.

The entire eclipse around me can't tell. They can't see the grief sitting under my skin. Can't see the exhaustion. Can't see me replaying conversations over and over wondering if there was some moment, some sentence, some tiny fracture where this could've gone differently.

And somehow life still insists on slipping strange moments of warmth into the middle of all this darkness. Small reminders that I'm still human underneath the grief. Brief moments where the noise quiets down for a second and I almost forget the weight I'm carrying before it all comes rushing back again.

This summer has become the summer of fuck all.

Not clarity. Not revelation. Not escape.

Just grief. Isolation. Heat. Silence. Trying to paint while your mind keeps drifting toward a bridge you weren't standing on but somehow can't stop seeing.

And in the end I'm left screaming into the dunes where only whales and coyotes can hear me. The sound disappears into fog and salt air like it never existed at all.

I can't run fast enough from this solitude.

People think artists romanticize suffering. Truth is most of us are just trying to survive it long enough to make something honest from the wreckage.

I miss my friend. I'm angry at my friend. I love my friend. I don't understand my friend.

And maybe that's the worst part. The questions stay alive longer than the person does.

Kevin is no longer here. The rest suddenly means so much less now.

The openings. The career. The attention. The mythology of being an artist.

All of it feels smaller standing next to death.

But the world keeps moving anyway. There's an art opening soon. People will shake my hand. Ask about the work. Ask how the residency is going. Tell me how lucky I am to be here.

So I'll put the mask back on again and step into the lights like nothing inside me is collapsing at all.

And maybe that's the real tragedy of all this.

The real artists. The real sensitive ones. The ones who feel the world so deeply it tears holes through them.

Too many of them don't make it.

Day one in the dunes and I finally understand why Inside Llewyn Davis hits so hard.

Not because of the music. Because of the feeling underneath it all.

That quiet drifting through life carrying ambition, loneliness, uncertainty, and the constant need to keep creating even when the world isn't fully meeting you back. Existing in between beauty and disappointment at the same time.

That's what this feels like already.

Oil lamps on before sunset. Dinner made on an old propane stove. No people in sight. Just silence, cold air, and the strange realization that maybe some people need to disappear from the noise for a while in order to find themselves again.

The dunes feel a lot like my concrete studio in winter. Same isolation. Same confrontation with yourself. Just softer somehow.

If you've never seen Inside Llewyn Davis, watch it alone sometime. You'll either completely understand this feeling or you won't at all.

Last night was my first night in the dune shack.

I came out here carrying all the stories people tell about this place. The artists, the isolation, the idea that somehow being out here changes you. I think part of me wanted it to feel sacred or meaningful or like I was stepping into something bigger than myself.

Instead I spent half the night wondering if I was slowly unraveling because of a spoon moving slightly on a table.

Once the sun went down, the fantasy disappeared fast.

The cold out here feels different because there's nowhere to escape it. The dark is complete. The walls creak constantly. Every sound feels huge. A gust of wind against the shack suddenly feels deeply personal. At one point I became psychologically attached to a loose nail in the wall.

And the silence is not peaceful the way people romanticize it. It's loud. Loud enough that every thought you've been avoiding suddenly has room to start talking.

I also have ADHD, which turns this experience into a full sensory event. Little noises don't stay little. My brain locks onto them immediately. A creak becomes a storyline. A branch brushing the roof becomes an emergency. Your mind starts looping because there's nothing around to interrupt it. I genuinely understand now how someone could walk into the dunes and return three days later speaking exclusively in metaphors.

What hit me hardest though was realizing I wasn't out here trying to become an artist.

I already built my entire life around art.

This isn't some romantic experiment for me. This is my actual life. The sacrifices are already real. The instability is already real. The obsession is already real. I moved my entire existence around this thing years ago.

So sitting out here in the dark, alone with all the mythology surrounding places like this, I think part of me wanted confirmation that all of it meant something. That all the years of chasing this life, giving things up for it, structuring everything around it, would suddenly feel justified in this environment.

Instead I just felt incredibly human.

Cold. Lonely. Overstimulated somehow by complete silence. Missing people. Wanting comfort. Wanting connection. Sitting in a shack in the dunes dressed like a Depression-era fisherman trying to convince myself this is spiritually enriching.

Nobody talks about this part. They talk about isolation afterward once it becomes poetic in memory. Nobody talks about the first night where you're lying there thinking maybe the real artistic revolution was insulation and regular access to other people.

It's only day one.

Right now this feels less like transcendence and more like my nervous system getting mugged by Cape Cod.

Today at 12:30 PM I begin my dune shack residency in Provincetown.

Yesterday I almost backed out completely.

I was overwhelmed in a way that honestly surprised me. Fear, pressure, excitement, anxiety, all at once. It felt strangely like being a kid leaving for summer camp for the first time. Which sounds ridiculous to admit publicly as an adult, but it's true.

I think part of it is understanding the history of where I'm about to go.

The dune shacks are not normal places. They have held generations of artists, writers, painters, drifters, outsiders, and people trying to hear themselves think clearly for the first time. Eugene O'Neill wrote there. Kerouac spent time there. Tennessee Williams wandered those same dunes. Pollock and Lee Krasner moved through Provincetown during the years American painting itself was being reinvented.

And honestly, I think people romanticize the outcome while forgetting the actual process.

Because I doubt any of them walked into the dunes fully certain of themselves either.

I doubt they always knew where the work was going.
I doubt every painting was good.
I doubt every page was brilliant.
I doubt they felt understood all the time.

The bad drafts, failed paintings, isolation, obsession, loneliness, confusion, silence, and doubt were probably part of the process too.

That's what I'm walking into today.

Not certainty.
Not some fantasy of artistic genius.

Just honesty.

I'm carrying a lot with me into those dunes. Ambition. Exhaustion. Questions about visibility and whether the work I'm making is truly reaching people. The pressure I put on myself to build something meaningful with my life. Paintings I desperately want to make. And the beginning of a musical that has been forming somewhere deep in my head called Concrete Winter.

Part of me feels completely terrified.
Part of me feels like this could change everything.
Part of me feels ridiculous for even believing that.

And maybe none of it works.

Maybe I leave with bad paintings and half-written songs.
Maybe I come back more confused than when I entered.

But I'm starting to realize the process itself may actually be the important part. Going honestly into the unknown. Letting yourself disappear from the noise long enough to hear something real underneath it.

What feels meaningful is that when I come out of the dunes, I'll immediately be stepping into my opening at White Porch Gallery featuring the Concrete Winter series I painted through this past winter in Provincetown.

Months spent painting in freezing temperatures.
Now disappearing into the dunes.

From frozen winter paintings to dune isolation.
It somehow feels like part of the same story.

So today I go into the dunes.

To paint.
To write.
To think.
To probably lose my mind a little.
And hopefully return with something honest.