Today I bought a printer. And while I was taking it out of the box, removing all the plastic, looking at the ink bottles and trying to understand where everything was supposed to go, I realised that I was ridiculously happy. Not normal I bought a new piece of technology happy. I was genuinely emotional about a printer.

And at some point I actually thought: this isn’t just a printer. It’s everything behind the printer.

Yesterday I wrote about something I had heard in a video that completely changed the way I was looking at this moment of my life. Instead of continuing to ask myself how to make certain things smaller, perhaps I need to concentrate on making my life bigger. I ended that post thinking about the things that make me feel alive: music, photography, travelling, making clothes, creating something that didn’t exist before. And then today this big cardboard box arrived.

It sounds almost ridiculous when I put it like that, but somehow this printer represents exactly that part of my life.

Because I didn’t buy it just to print documents. I bought it because I want to make things. I want to print photographs and images. I want to make stencils. I want to experiment with collages. I want to use it for clothes and fashion projects, for art, for all the strange ideas that appear in my head and then inevitably turn into another strange idea before I have even finished the first one. I want to be able to sit at my desk, think what if I tried this?, print something, cut it, destroy it, change it, stick it onto something else and see what happens.

I think that is why opening the box affected me so much. The last period of my life has taken an enormous amount of energy. So much of my attention has had to go towards things I didn’t choose, things I didn’t want to deal with, things that have occupied space in my head whether I wanted them there or not. And today I was suddenly setting up a machine that exists entirely for something I do choose.

Creating.

There is something incredibly grounding about making physical things. An idea begins somewhere invisible inside your head and eventually becomes something you can touch. A photograph becomes a print. An image becomes a stencil. A drawing becomes part of a piece of clothing. Something that existed only in your imagination suddenly exists in the room with you.

And I think I need more of that right now.

More making. More experimenting. More stupid ideas that might become brilliant ideas or might become complete disasters. More afternoons covered in paper, fabric, ink, scissors and glue. More things that have absolutely nothing to do with solving problems and everything to do with curiosity. More moments when I am so absorbed in creating something that I forget to look at the clock.

Maybe that is what moved me today. This printer represents possibility. Not some enormous abstract possibility of becoming a different person or suddenly having a different life. Something much smaller and much more tangible: I can make things again.

I can have an idea and do something with it.

I can play.

I can create.

And after everything that has occupied my mind lately, that feels surprisingly close to getting a piece of myself back.

So yes, today I bought a printer. But it doesn’t really feel like I bought a printer. It feels like I bought myself a little more space to become alive again.

Maybe starting again doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it arrives in a cardboard box with an instruction manual and four bottles of ink.