the tuesday letter
It is eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night and you are still working.
Not designing anything. Working.
Your laptop is open on your knees, where you landed after dinner. The room is quiet in the way that only happens after everyone else has gone to sleep.
You are writing the email about the custom brocade wingback chair, the one the whole room takes its cue from, the one that was supposed to arrive next week and is now six weeks out. Install day moves again. You’ve written the email four times. One sounded like you were apologizing for something that wasn’t your fault. Another sounded like it came from someone who had never been in her home. You delete both, because she needs to hear that you care before she hears the timeline. You settle on the fourth version a little after midnight. It is not the email you would have written if you had gotten to this earlier in the day. There are two other clients waiting for similar news, and you still have to find the words for them too.
You didn’t become a designer for this.
Not said out loud. Not sent to anyone. Just a heaviness that moves through you at this hour, while you are doing the part of the work that no one sees.
You know why you became a designer. Your stomach still bubbles with excitement when the client walks into the room on install day and their face floods with recognition before they speak. Those afternoons wandering through a showroom when you find the exact fabric and it pulls the whole project together. The vision that started as a feeling and became a room where someone’s real life happens.
Those moments still happen. They are what sustain you. But to get to them, you have to get through everything else first. Until the balance starts to tip.
More logistics, less vision. More inbox, less instinct. More of you in every role, less of you in the one that matters. Somewhere underneath the exhaustion, a question you didn’t expect to be asking at this stage of your practice.
How did the work I love become the smallest part of my day?
When this question keeps finding you, it is worth taking seriously. It isn’t burnout. It isn’t a discipline problem. It is a nagging thought telling you something true about how your time is actually being spent. A quiet reminder of what you want more of.
Then you see it. A voicemail from earlier today, buried under everything else.
It is a client from three months ago. She says she finally feels at home in a way she never has before. She thanks you for seeing her, for taking something she couldn’t quite articulate and making it real.
She finally feels at home
in a way she never has before.
It is these connections that sustain you. That carry you through the late night sourcing, the shipping delays, the revisions assembled at midnight.
That is what all of this is in service of. Connection and creativity.
If you got to the end of this, you have had that Tuesday.
Jenelle
To understand how I work, start here.