On Not Selling

I went to see Zadie Smith speak in Toronto the other night, and I want to set down what happened there, which is that nothing in particular happened.

She did not say one thing that changed my mind. She talked about her life plainly, the way people talk about the weather. She writes. She reads as much as she can. She loves her family. That was all. It was enough to undo something in me.

I have loved her writing since “White Teeth” came out and a professor with unusual ideas about what counted as literature put it on our syllabus. Something written in the last 50 years. Imagine.

At some point, she talked about girlhood.

Girlhood, as I understood her, or as I wanted to understand her, which is not always the same thing, is the brief stretch of life in which you belong to no one, in which you are not yet tethered to a job or a mortgage or anyone else’s idea of you, and you spend it deciding who you are, consciously or not, in notebooks and bedrooms and in the clothes you refuse to wear.

Just do the thing, as my dad would.

I decided. I am fairly sure I decided. And I have noticed, in the years since, that when I act against what was decided then, I feel it. Not as guilt, exactly. More as a low hum of wrongness, like a picture hung a quarter-inch off.

Here is the part I find funny…

I work in communications and marketing. It is my day job. I have an MBA, which is to say that I paid an institution money to learn how a market works. I know how a campaign is built, how a message is tested, how a funnel narrows. I have taken what I know and turned it toward my own work instead of someone else’s, and it has worked. By most measures, it has worked.

And still, every time I set out to sell my art, purposefully, with intent, I felt the hum.

It is one thing to sell someone else’s thing. It is another to stand beside your own drawing and explain why a print of it is worth $24.

I am not a salesperson. What I am, it turns out, is a person who can explain almost anything in a way that leaves you unable to picture your life without it. I just do not want to do that with my own drawings or words.

What I remembered while listening to her deep, distinct English-accented voice was simpler than any of that. What I make is mine. I can keep making it for as long as I want.

My father was never someone who set out to prove himself. He did not announce things. He did the thing, and then he checked the lotto numbers.

I think about that more than I expected to.

I will do the thing, too. The way that feels right to me. The way I enjoy.

I am taking my cue from him, and my instructions from the girl who decided who I would be. If she would not have done it, I am not doing it.

So: on Instagram, I will be at @daniellagirgenti, and nowhere else. The Evil B Creative shop remains open. I will not be standing in its doorway, flagging down passersby on every platform available, performing an enthusiasm for TikTok I have never once felt.

I am aware of how this looks. A piece of writing about not selling, on a website with a shop, from a woman with an MBA. I know what a funnel is. I may be standing in one right now.

The difference, as far as I can tell, is this: I am not going to tell you why you need anything. I am going to draw, and write down what I notice, and put it somewhere you can find. If you see something here and it is yours, you will know. You will not need me to explain why you cannot imagine not having it.

I just want to draw and write. I do not entirely know why. It is soothing, which is not nothing. And there is a particular contentment, quiet and specific, in someone seeing what I made and telling me they feel it too.

That will have to be the reason. It may be the only one I need.

– Daniella