Basking Unbothered

The demands of a high-stakes role at one the world’s most influential tech companies layered atop years of deliberate reinvention, from a data analyst to a software and data engineer, had quietly pushed the creative practices that I held most sacred to the margins of my life. My days collapsed into eight, nine, ten hours of meetings, our team marching in lockstep with a pre-pandemic delivery schedule as the world came apart at the seams.

We put coughing fits on mute, and turned off our cameras to have panic attacks in private. Work did not make space for a graceful pause when family members fell ill. Nor when the capital was stormed. We soldiers on as if we were saving lives. We soldiered on as though we were on the front lines of something vital for humanity.

We build AI.

We focus on releasing cutting edge health models “just-a-little-too-late.”

We ignore the fact that you can only access them on a device that costs more than most people pay for a month’s rent.

We sit in the comfort of work-from-home offices pretending that it is “we” who will save lives.

Too exhausted to cook? Order from the corner pizza place. We’re saving the community.

Rest was a concept I could name but not touch, and the weight of that absence pressed down steadily.

I had enough sense not to complain. I knew others carried heavier things. There there were weeks — long, seamless weeks — when my mind never went quiet. Seattle’s long summer sunsets, arriving after months of near-total darkness, offered no comfort. Instead, they delivered a bright, disorienting delirium. A restlessness with no bottom.

My hands ached for something other than the mechanical rhythm of typing. My mind needed to be coaxed, forced, into stillness.

I began sketching in the five minutes between meetings, and it was like a sedative administered directly to the nervous system. Then, as if drawn by something older and more instinctive than habit, I found myself moving toward the canvas. I hadn’t painted anything of substance in over a decade. But something in my body remembered, and it wasn’t asking; it was insisting. I imagined what it might feel like to stand fully in sunlight again — to look back at the world with open, unbothered eyes, indifferent to its returning gaze. And, it was from within this fog that this painting was born. 2 years later. The pandemic was deemed ended. I’d released myself from the golden hand-cuffs that never looked good on me anyway. The rainy Upper West Coast was a chapter in my past. I was basking, unbothered in the eternal sunshine of Atlanta. Rest was my new way of life. Claimed. I was no longer a builder of AI. I was just a user like everyone else. I experimented bringing artificial life to my creation. Basking unbothered as a painting captures a moment of stillness. As an AI generated short video, it tells the story of the very moment when the transition to being witnessed occurs.

As Ms. Erykah Badu once said, “I’m an artist — I’m sensitive about my sh!t.” So understand that including this imperfect, perfect piece in this digital space has not come easy. But here it is, regardless.

With Love from ATL