I rearranged my bedroom eleven times before I was thirteen.

That same year, I started keeping a diary, which turned into years of journals. My family stopped asking why about the furniture. I couldn't explain either habit at the time. I knew a room needed a shift, and so did a page.

By high school, I was faux-finishing walls and decorating rooms for friends. In my early twenties, I worked for an artist in Malibu who upcycled clothing, hand-sewing lace and small details into old slips and giving them a second life, and then spent a stretch of time organizing people's closets, making them make sense, making them beautiful. None of it had a name yet. It was the same habit. Paid work now, instead of my own room.

Eventually, school gave it an academic name: interdisciplinary studies. What I do now is multidisciplinary. I studied it through fashion, art history, design, communications, because none of them alone explained what I was actually doing. I wanted my hands in every medium at once.

Color next to color until one of them woke the other up. A print that had no business touching that fabric, but it touched it anyway. A canvas sat blank until the first stroke decided it. A room started from one image, and the image could be almost anything: a leaf, a photograph, a texture I ran my hand over once and didn't forget. Hours would go by, and I wouldn't notice. That was always the sign I was in the right place.

Walking into a room and your shoulders drop before you've even set your bag down. Standing at the edge of water and breathing out something you didn't know you'd been holding. That's what I'm actually after. Everything else is the material I happen to be using that day.

I got sober in 2012. It's part of how I got here, not the reason I got here. It sharpened my attention rather than starting it, and that attention shows up in the work now, whether I'm writing a sentence or setting a table.

These days it moves across three forms. The writing lives in The House. The food lives in The Table. The rooms I design by hand, some I only ever finish on paper, live in Design Journal. Different mediums, but the same eye behind all of them: the one that used to rearrange furniture at midnight because a corner was wrong and I already knew it.

I still can't explain what I do in a single sentence. You'll probably understand it faster than I can say it.