I’ll admit it—I was nervous walking into the Pancakes & Booze show last night. Nerves are funny things: they don’t care how many times you’ve shown up before, they don’t care if you’ve prepared. They just whisper, what if you don’t belong?
But as soon as I got set up, the nerves started dissolving. Because people showed up. They wandered by, paused, looked, asked questions, and sometimes—miracle of miracles—resonated. That simple connection shifted everything. My chest loosened, my hands steadied. Suddenly I wasn’t the anxious artist hiding behind a canvas—I was part of the current.
And here’s what I kept circling back to: appreciation.
Appreciation for the texts that buzzed my phone before the show even started. Little notes from friends and family: Good luck, you’ve got this, proud of you. Each one was a small anchor, proof that I wasn’t doing this alone.
Appreciation for a friend who actually took the time to stop by in person. There’s something deeply moving about someone rearranging their night just to stand in front of your work and say, I wanted to be here.
Appreciation for the other artists—who could have been competitive, who could have stayed in their own lanes, but instead offered kind words, traded insights, and reminded me that we’re all just out here painting our obsessions.
And of course—appreciation for the pancakes. I thought they’d be a gimmick, a sideshow to keep people fed while they glanced at the art. But no—people ate them with the kind of devotion usually reserved for religion or romance. Forks rising and falling in trance-like rhythm. It turns out pancakes weren’t the background—they were the main event.
As the night wound down, I carried that gratitude with me. We drove home right at midnight, and the glitter of the show gave way to something heavier: fields of people sleeping on the concrete, row after row, wrapped in blankets that barely kept the night air out. No pillows. No walls. Just bodies against stone. That sight carved me open. It made the privilege of presenting art feel staggering—the privilege to paint, to play, to invite others into my inner world while others have nowhere to rest their own.
And yet even in the weight of that reflection, I held onto the truth that love, even in microdoses, changes everything. It only takes a handful of voices—I see you, I appreciate you, I’m excited for what you’ll make next—to alter the whole nervous system. Tonight I felt that love from every direction: friends, family, strangers, people I’d just met.
So yes, tonight was a success. Not because I conquered nerves, not because my work was seen, not even because I painted alongside a pancake apocalypse. It was a success because of appreciation—because I got to feel the way a little bit of love, shared in so many different forms, can transform a night.
At midnight, I realized: I carried home not stacks of pancakes, but stacks of love disguised as gratitude.