Success continued to elude me. I had followed my dreams over the edge of a cliff, it seemed. I knew what I wanted to do but felt like nobody would pay me to do it. I had begun to feel like nothing had ever worked out in my whole adult life—not working, not getting an education, not promoting myself online, not networking in person. Was life passing me by? Was it too late for me to make a name for myself as an artist and designer? When would my name finally appear on lists of artists you should know about and designers to watch?

After I made a series of thwarted plans and things seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, the COVID-19 pandemic began. The pressure to achieve collided with the urgency of life in survival mode. As the weeks turned into months, and the months into over a year, and my concept of time became distorted beyond recognition, I found myself living in a world that desperately wanted to go back to normal when normal had been so disappointing for me. Though I had intended for this to be an art book, The Unforeseeable Future contains more essays than artwork, spanning a time when everything I knew was upended by unforeseeable calamities and preventable tragedies.