I Just Have Manicures

Let’s just say it out loud.

We have an emperor with no clothes in the White House. Frat boys running the Department of Defense and the FBI. A situation in Iran that everyone is carefully not calling a war while doing absolutely everything a war involves. Prices that have decided the laws of economics are more of a suggestion. An immigration enforcement apparatus that terrorizes communities, separates families, and runs detention facilities that are concentration camps in everything but the nameplate. Major layoffs — some because the economy is genuinely contracting, some because a CEO needed to find more money for stakeholders and your salary was right there. And a small collection of men who have accumulated enough wealth and power to become actual supervillains, complete with secret lairs, and have decided that’s a personality.

It’s a lot, dude.

It is completely reasonable to feel overwhelmed by this. This is no time to be whelmed. Others will have a self-help solution to shove down your throat — a gratitude journal, a cold plunge, a mindset shift, a supplement. I’m not here to do that.

I just have manicures.

Here’s how it started.

It was 2020. COVID had arrived with all the subtlety of a freight train and all the consideration of a housefire. People I loved were coming apart — physically, mentally, emotionally — in ways I couldn’t fix and could barely witness. My body had locked up from the inside. I was moving like one of those old tin soldiers, or a Barbie with click knees from my childhood — all tension and no give. My normal creative outlets, the things I’d always reached for when the world got heavy, had stopped working. Too much effort. Too much space required. Too much of me needed to show up.

My therapist asked me a simple question: was there anything I could think of that would be a quick, easy win? Something I could finish and look at as a small piece of art?

I said I used to love doing my nails.

I want to be clear that what followed was less a gentle return to a childhood hobby and more a full-speed derailment into an obsession. If a rabbit hole implies something gradual and curious, this was more of a train — no brakes, increasing velocity, a Bengal cat named Beaker somehow already on board. I started with lacquer. Then gel polish. Then stamping. Then gel tips. Then an ad appeared for making your own nail polish, a box arrived, and everything inside it was sparkly and colorful and I was gone. Done. Cooked.

But here’s what happened first, before the train left the station entirely: I looked at my nails in the morning and thought, I did that.

And the tension was a little less.

That’s it. That’s the whole thesis. Not a cure. Not a substitute for therapy — I am a big fan of therapy, given my own considerable baggage and the world being a flaming bag of poo that someone has stepped on. But between therapy sessions, between episodes of Pod Save America, in the small hours when you need to do something, anything, to feel less unmoored — a ritual helps. Something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Something you can look at when it’s done and think: I made that. It exists. I was here.

For me it was nails. For you it might be something else entirely. I’m not prescribing.

But if you’ve been thinking about it — if the bottles have been sitting in a drawer, if you’ve watched the tutorials and talked yourself out of it — maybe now is the time. The world is not going to sort itself out while you wait for a better moment. There is no better moment. There is just this one, and your hands, and something small and colorful and yours.

That’s how a nail polish brand gets started, incidentally. What began as survival — a therapist’s suggestion, a quick win, a little less tension in a locked-up body — became something I couldn’t stop. Thirty-eight formulas later, working out of a loft in Houston with a Bengal cat who takes no accountability for anything and a husband — Eric the Grownup — who sighs at my shenanigans with the patience of a saint and the resignation of a man who knew exactly what he was signing up for, I make small-batch indie nail polish for people who need a little color in a very gray moment.

We called one of them You’re Soaking In It. Named for Madge — patron saintess of Palmolive, great warrior poet, purveyor of the most iconic product reveal in daytime television history. It’s a thermochromic: cold, it’s a vintage melon. Warm, it shifts to a deep moody teal. A constant gold haze throughout, because some things should be a little golden even when everything else isn’t.

You’re soaking in it.

Might as well make it pretty.