Acceptance Is Its Own Winter

journal entry- Day Two of Snow

This morning is day two of snow on the ground, the kind that quiets everything except the noise inside my own mind. I’m sitting at my laptop, trying to tackle end-of-year business, and suddenly I feel like a collection’s agent. It feels ugly to go around asking to be paid. My profits have dipped these past few years while I dedicated myself to deep learning and leadership work. Even now, I'm juggling a long delayed project that weighs on me. Not because I'm not working, but because some circumstances are simply beyond my control. It's hard to hold myself accountable while also navigating situations I didn't create.
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And then I reach out to a friend for professional advice, and it hits me with a kind of sharp clarity:
I deeply loathe this part of the business.

Maybe the discomfort goes deeper than email threads or overdue invoices. Maybe it’s rooted in poverty, in how Native/Indigenous artists have always been viewed. I think of the artists I grew up seeing—walking down the street holding a painting or other creation in their hands, hoping to make a sale. I remember people complaining when they saw artisans coming toward their door. There was never a place for art to simply exist, to have artist’s work professionally on display, to be seen as legitimate. So, they circulated—business to business, crowd to crowd—waiting for someone, anyone, to say yes.

Yet when I look around my own home, at the pieces my family owns, I admire those acquisitions even more now. The beauty of the work, yes—but also the tenacity. The courage it took for those artists to subject themselves to the possibility of a hundred rejections just to survive. Now that I sit with it, I wonder if that’s where my own small strand of tenacity comes from. And maybe that’s why I’m apprehensive too. I carry the history and the memory of what it takes.

And even now—after all these years, all this work, all this sacrifice—I sometimes still feel like I am begging to be accepted. Begging to belong somewhere. Begging to be seen without having to shrink or explain myself. And the truth is: it rarely happens.

A bigger part of me has learned to whisper back, It’s okay. They don’t deserve what comes from the light you bring. That voice is protective, ancestral, steady. But the logical part of me still wonders: why can’t we simply support artists in a way that sustains them? Why must it require clawing at our own spirits? Why does survival have to be synonymous with self-extraction?

And in the quiet of these days, I’m noticing something else rising—something I didn’t invite. As we prepare for a new life in a new state, I can feel the past refusing to let go of me. Old traumas, long buried in decades of dust and survival, insist on resurfacing. People I haven’t spoken to in years are trying to reinsert themselves into my orbit, even if just on the perimeter. It’s unsettling how persistence shows up in the very people who once caused harm.

I don’t want to cut off parts of myself. I don’t want to prune away pieces of my own history or identity. But protecting myself sometimes requires exactly that—a trimming, a boundary that aches. Healing asks us to let go, yet the past seems determined to cling to the hem of my coat as I walk forward. And walking forward is what I must do.

The professional world echoes that same pattern. We are still dealing with the fallout of someone's lack of professionalism—someone who has chosen to twist words and shift blame towards many people, including a person I love. Months later, it should be obvious where the true problems lie with the person still there, still stirring the pot, still projecting. And yet, what hurts most isn’t the content of their accusations—it’s that they dare speak against others at all. As though their words exist in a vacuum. As though their whispers won’t roll downhill and gather force. But they do. They have real consequences. They even have the power to influence how my child is viewed in higher education and beyond. Their smallness becomes dangerous when institutions, neighbors, and community listen.

It is exhausting to build a new life while the old one keeps grabbing at your ankles.

Going back to the world of artistry, I think about a man who walked into the community hall while I was setting up my aunt’s funeral. He came in carrying a willow rocking chair—delicate, curved, lovingly made. I didn’t have room for it, not really. But I bought it because I appreciated his craft, his artistry, his survival. Sometimes that’s the best some of us can do—support each other not because we must, but because we know what it means when no one else does.

And still, despite all of that—despite the empathy, the lineage, the understanding—I cringe every time I must ask about money.

Even now, typing these words, my shoulders tighten. I wish this part didn’t feel like begging. I wish artistry wasn’t tethered to the shame of needing to be paid for what we give, what we pour out from breath and memory. I wish acceptance didn’t feel like a door that only cracks open for some, while others must build their own from scraps.

But maybe naming it is one step toward releasing the weight of it. Or at least toward reminding myself that asking to be paid is not a burden—it’s a right. That acceptance is not a prize—it’s a basic human dignity. And that artists deserve to thrive without sacrificing the very spirit that makes the work possible.

Today, the snow feels like a teacher. It doesn’t ask permission to fall, to soften the earth, to quiet the noise. It simply takes its place and transforms the landscape. Maybe this season is asking the same of me—to settle into my own belonging, even when acceptance is scarce, and trust that the light will return in its own time.

Winter has a way of reminding us that even the darkest months hold a slow, steady promise. Light returns, not because we earn it, but because it is inevitable. Perhaps my work, my voice, my survival are their own kind of solstice—small illuminations that keep breaking through, no matter how many times the world tries to dim them.

So, before I pack another box of my old makeshift studio—the little room that held so many seasons of me—I pick up a paintbrush, the familiar weight grounding me. A canvas white like the snow that now surrounds us. This is how I move foward: one stroke, one bead, one stitch, one color, one breath at a time. Even if the world can't see it yet, I am making my own prints in the snow, shaping my path the only way I know how. 

And as I look outside, the snow covers everything in sight—old footprints, uneven ground, all the places I’ve trudged through. It feels like an invitation. A fresh blanket of possibility. A chance to step forward with softer steps and a clearer heart.
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Maybe this is my beginning again.

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Hillary Kempenich standing in Laurie Anderson's Four Talks at Hirshhorn Museum