09/17/2026
I've written and deleted this post more times than I can count.
For almost fourteen years, I have shared so much of my life here. The mountains. The jewellery. The laughter from the studio. The messy middle. My Mom. Grief. Love. Becoming. All of it woven together because have never really known how to separate the things I make from the life that makes them.
And then, sometime this spring, I stopped knowing what to say.
So I went quiet.
The truth is, the last few months have dismantled my life in ways I am still trying to understand.
I closed my studio. I said goodbye to my team. I packed away a version of Mackenzie Jones that I had spent years building and believed would carry myself and my team forward.
And underneath all of that, I was falling apart.
This summer, I reached the darkest place I have ever been. I survived when my broken mind said "just do it, at least the pain would stop. I have not been to that place in my adult life.
That is an incredibly difficult sentence to write publicly.
There is a part of me that wants to make it prettier. To wrap it in some lesson about resilience or transformation or finding the light.
But I don't think I want to do that anymore.
I was hurting more than I knew how to carry.
And I survived.
In the aftermath, I started asking myself a question that has followed me through so much of my life:
What would it actually look like to choose myself?
Not the version of choosing myself that still keeps everyone else comfortable.
Not enduring a little longer because I know I can.
Not making myself smaller, easier, quieter or stronger so that a life that no longer fits can continue fitting around me.
Actually choosing to live.
That question has changed almost everything.
The life I had built in Montana became untenable. I was carrying more than my soul could hold So, for now, I came home to Canada.
And almost immediately, life cracked open again.
My Dad was diagnosed with ALS.
There are some sentences that divide your life into before and after. That was one of them.
So now l am learning an entirely different kind of surrender.
I am learning that there are things love cannot fix.
I am learning how to sit beside someone I love without trying to save them.
I am learning how to be my Dad's daughter while we still have this time together.
I am learning that grief and living are not opposites.
Some days l am making phone calls about home care and respiratory appointments. Some days l am unpacking boxes and trying to make this place feel like home. I am slowly setting up a little studio again. I walk. I cry. I laugh with friends I have known forever. I drink coffee with my dad. I make things when can.
And somewhere inside all of that, I am finding pieces of myself again.
I don't have a beautiful five-year plan to reveal.
I don't know exactly what Mackenzie Jones looks like from here.
I don't know exactly what I look like from here.
Maybe that is the point.
For so long I thought becoming meant knowing where I was going
Now I think sometimes becoming is simply having the courage to admit that the old life is over before you know what the new one will be.
There has been so much loss.
But there has also been an extraordinary amount of love.
Friends showing up. People sitting with Dad so l can leave the house for a few hours. Old connections wrapping themselves around me.
People carrying pieces of this when I finally stopped insisting I could carry everything myself.
And all of you have been here too, even while I disappeared…
I don't know how often I will post yet. I don't want to promise consistency or launches or some grand return to business as usual.
Because I am not returning to business as usual.
I don't think I ever can.
I want whatever comes next in my work and in my life to be built with intention. With creativity. With mountains. With meaning. With considerably less abandoning myself in order to keep everything else alive.
Maybe that means this space changes with me.
Maybe it becomes a little more human.
A little less polished.
A little more about what it actually means to lose yourself and find your way back.
Because I know I am not the only woman standing in the wreckage of a life she thought she would have, wondering who the f**k she is supposed to become now.
If that is you too, maybe we can find out together.
For today, though, I don't have anything to sell you.
I just wanted to come back into the room and tell you the truth.
1am home.
I am still breathing.
I am still becoming.
1am still here.
And right now, that is enough. 🖤🖤🖤
