The Politics of Falling Apart.
Lessons from an All-American Subversive.
A few weeks ago, halfway into a shift at my seasonal job, an old college professor walked into the store. My stomach dropped as I instinctively turned around to hide, busying myself with some inane task as a distraction. She took a lap around the store before realizing it didn’t have what she was looking for and left just as quickly as she appeared. I never said hello because I was convinced she wouldn’t remember me, and we’d be forced to have the uncomfortable exchange where one pretends to remember someone but doesn’t. I was also afraid of what would happen if she did recognize me—because standing before her would be a previous student who hadn’t done much with her life since 2016 and was now working at a stationary store. I stood there, silent and stupefied, as my warring emotions clashed inside me.
In 2016, I was in the second year of my undergrad at UCLA. As a studio art major with an art history minor, I was consumed by creating and critiquing art in all its forms. Classes ranged from typical seminar-style to completely unconventional, and I loved every second. I built sculptures and used power tools and stretched my own canvases. I gessoed and sanded and painted, falling in love with the seductive quality of oil-based paint. I learned the (now dying) art of developing film and color darkroom printing, tinkering with the cyans and magentas of my photographs until they were perfect. I even did performance art, which was weird. The wide breadth of mediums was intended to help students develop their artistic voices, but during my time there, I often felt profoundly alone and unsure of who I was as both an artist and a human being. I didn’t know this feeling would linger long after college and well into my adulthood.
I took Advanced Photography in my second year with Catherine Opie, a photographer whose work I still greatly admire. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to study under her and excited to push myself and my work further—even if I was slightly terrified. The theme of the class was Americana, which was chosen before Trump’s victory. After the election, however, this theme swelled with new meaning: what did it mean to be an artist in Trump’s America?
We met for class the same day the election results were called. The classroom I walked into that day was still and silent, the lights above us turned off. Our TA stood resigned in the corner with red, puffy eyes, quietly letting each student know they didn’t have to stay if they needed time to process the day’s events. Class wasn’t required today, considering the circumstances. It felt futile to talk about art’s potential for change amid crushing disappointment and mounting fear.
Seeing Cathy again on the cusp of another Trump presidency made me feel an intense mixture of emotions that left me dazed for the remainder of my shift. I was hit from all sides with memories from those years in art school—memories I hadn’t revisited in a long time. I took a ten and sat in a parking lot just outside the break room, holding my head and attempting to parse this impenetrable tangle of feelings that sat heavy as lead in my stomach. This encounter forced me to contend with not just political stagnancy—this feeling of going backward—but also with my own creative stagnancy. This led to intense, dizzying, all-consuming shame.
I gave up on being an artist. After I graduated and found a gallery job, I eventually gave up on that, too. I gave up working in fashion and eventually marketing. I gave up and gave up and gave up, over and over again, and as I sifted through my life’s accomplishments, I couldn’t find anything I was proud of. Life, even amid the dismal political climate, seemed to hold unlimited potential in 2016. By 2024, nearly a decade later, that potential felt squandered. And how poetically life had forced me to confront it! Sitting in a camping chair in the parking lot right outside the breakroom, I threw my head back and laughed. This reckoning felt almost Shakespearean.
As the weeks bore on in 2016 and the new reality of America set in, we continued making art and critiquing one another’s work. During one of our final critiques, Ariel Levy, a staff writer at The New Yorker, observed our class for a piece she was writing about Cathy. I had all but forgotten about her visit until the piece came out. I didn’t expect any of us to be mentioned, let alone quoted—and I certainly didn’t expect to see myself described in such vivid detail. But there I was, on the page:
The class turned its attention to a young woman who looked like Audrey Hepburn, with a hoop piercing the cartilage between her nostrils. Her work depicted members of her family but looked like war photography, with children playing or crying around abandoned buildings that evoked bombed-out rubble. “I’m really over it,” she said. “I’m at this point where I don’t even know how to make photos. They’re just falling apart.”
“What’s when you dig deeper,” Opie said slowly, but with excitement. “It’s actually a good place to be in, having something fall apart.” (source)
About a week or so before Cathy visited the store, my coworkers and I shared stories about our college experiences. I told them about art school and mentioned that New Yorker piece, my one claim to fame, which led me to dig up and revisit the piece in 2024. It felt strange to see myself there again, like encountering a past life. What’s even stranger is that this piece resurfaced in my memory at all, and that Cathy walked into the store I worked at just a few weeks later. My mind, drawn to patterns, synchronicities, and serendipities, couldn’t help but take notice. A seed was planted. This essay was inevitable.
For years I held that New Yorker piece in my mind like it was the climax of my life and career, regarded it like it was the tipping point before it all went to shit—but this strange series of events helped me understand that it’s not. There is a lot of societal programming, particularly for women, regarding milestones and achievements—career by X age, marriage by Y, kids by Z. It’s hard to divorce yourself from that timeline as a human being, but it is essential that we do, because any setback or obstacle is going to feel like the end of the world. As creative people, every day holds the potential for a new setback or obstacle. Rejection and failure are integral parts of the job; I know this. So why am I still so terrified of it?
It’s a good place to be in, having something fall apart. Politically, this means we can eliminate the crumbling structures and institutions that no longer serve the American people. Personally, it means pretty much the same. But the process of falling apart is terrifying. It is so terrifying that many would prefer to suffer than change it, and many do. This is the part where, according to Opie, we have to dig deeper.
My days moonlighting as a shopgirl are over for the time being. Like most things in life, it was temporary—a mere stepping stone in the story arc of my life. I now see this process of falling apart, moving backward, and accepting rejection not as a failure but as an opportunity to rebuild. Success, however elusive and amorphous, doesn’t arrive on a fixed timeline, and it rarely looks how we expect it to. If I spent the entirety of my life waiting for success, I would blind myself to the beauty of the creative process itself. Success cannot be the guiding force behind your work. It has to be a deep and unflinching love for doing the work.
Art, life, careers, politics—all of it shifts and morphs, demanding reinvention and recalibration. Pieces scatter in the blast, but we can gather what holds meaning, wielding these artifacts like talismans—portals to another place in time. And perhaps that is the work: to honor what remains, to carry those fragments forward, and to continue creating from the ruins, one deliberate step at a time.
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Kait, I'm just now catching up on reading saved pieces--this is an absolutely beautiful piece and god so so timely for me, thank you so much for sharing
what a beautiful essay, and stunning photographs. feeling connected to so many of these sentiments, thank you for sharing.