Dispatch 54: Self-Portrait in Braces

And the Echo Season. Entry 0524202.5

I’ve felt like I’ve suited up my entire life. For weightlifting. For motorcycle racing. For long trail rides or themed exhibitions. Suiting up felt instinctive, unlike fashion, which always seemed to ask for something I didn’t have. Something other.

But give me the moment,
and I knew what to wear to meet it.

The right gear allowed for growth
with confidence for exploration and discovery.
The kind that allowed for expansion.

I first heard the phrase “suit up”
while watching the TV series, Arrow,
and it resonated because it named something I already knew.

Many people try on configurations to see how they look.
I wore them to learn who I might become.

I’m giddy about the braces. They’re deeply nerdy, in the best way: a network of brackets and archwires configured for functional transformation. It feels like an unexpected feature of a suit I hadn’t realized I’d been building. They feel like augmentation, a slow technical shift. A new vocal configuration, coming online.

What I didn’t expect was how much they’d change the way I speak. Not just the way I sound—though that, too—but the lisp and the slurs that rewrote my cadence. I became aware of voice as something architectural. Something that could resist, rewire, or adapt. Dispatches from the Liminal Bathroom becomes an experiment in that space, an endeavor to write my way into a voice I hadn’t fully met.

And they gleam. There’s something about that, too, about reclaiming shine after it’s been diminished. I didn’t mean for the braces to become symbolic. But here they are. Literal, yes. Metaphorical, increasingly. They arrived as function. They become part of the story.

Resilience, for me, hasn’t arrived through singular triumphs or clean breaks. It’s looked less like a turning point and more like a series of recursive life pivots—transitions that loop back on themselves, where what was once left behind re-emerges quietly, and becomes foundational. A former engineer leaves behind systems and networks to become a painter, only to discover that structure, constraint, and inquiry still quietly govern the studio. The pivot doesn’t reject the past. It reconfigures it. Each shift becomes a revision, not a reset.

It’s never been about grit, exactly. More about recalibration. A looping process of departure, return, and quiet adaptation. I’ve rebuilt my life more than once, not by discarding who I was but by carrying that version forward in altered form. There hasn’t been a single moment of breakthrough. No cinematic turn. Just a pattern of staying with the thing long enough to learn what else it could become.

I tend to work inward. I prefer long-form thought, solitude, and places where reflection outpaces reaction. That’s not to say resilience has come from stoicism. It hasn’t. But I’ve learned that endurance isn’t always loud. Sometimes it looks like tending to what’s necessary without needing to explain why. Sometimes it’s re-watching the same sci-fi series because it resets the atmosphere.

After a profound loss, I noticed something peculiar. While others wished dreary days away, I welcomed them. Overcast skies, cold rain. They brought back the season I spent walking beside a horse I loved through recovery. He was in pain, and I had nowhere else I wanted to be. That time shaped how I engage with discomfort, not with detachment, but with care. I started noticing everything more: light patterns, small sounds, subtle changes in the landscape. That kind of attention stayed with me.

Curiosity is a quiet engine. It’s what keeps me working, even when the larger purpose feels unclear. Not curiosity for its own sake, but the kind that emerges when repetition meets observation. A willingness to look again. To ask small questions. To follow a thread, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. That’s where the patterns begin to show themselves, in the liminal moments of reflection and threshold, in a voice still suiting up for what it’s trying to say.

Resilience, for me, has meant learning how to remain. Inside uncertainty. Inside effort. Inside care. To improvise without spectacle. To continue when no one’s watching. Not because there’s a promise on the other side, but because the practice itself still feels worth doing.

The painting is available on my website. Like most of my work, it’s part story, part artifact.

Echo Season + Print Gifting

Thank you for being here, especially if you’ve only just arrived. I’m still learning how to write in this space. Still testing the architecture of a voice that’s under revision. Dispatches was never meant to be polished. It’s an experiment. A reflection. A way of suiting up through syntax.

Today happens to be my birthday. I’m marking it by gifting four print proofs from an earlier body of work, paintings made in a season of loss, tethered to a horse I loved. They carry the echo of a voice that was forming even then.

Winners are listed below. Just a small gesture of gratitude. For orbiting near. For listening through the static as I find my voice—still inside the suit, still mid-transmission, still becoming.

Congrats to the following winners! From your email client, reply directly to this email with your physical address, and I’ll have a randomly selected print shipped to your home.

1. josaphinedell@

2. dougbyrd@

3. pmescon@

4. jlhogan999@