*Preparing for my debut collection | 2021 | Photo credit* *Justyna Kulam*

I was the child who cried at a stern look.

The teenager who sank into melancholy when the world felt too loud, too sharp, too much. The one who felt other people's emotions like weather — arriving before they spoke, lingering long after they left.

You're too sensitive.

You worry too much.

You think about what others think way too much.

I heard these things so many times they stopped feeling like observations and started feeling like facts. Like something in me was miscalibrated. Like everyone else had access to a quieter, easier way of moving through the world — and I had somehow missed it.

So I did what a lot of sensitive people do. I got very good at not showing it. Twenty-five years building a career in colour and material design for luxury brands.

Uncompromising standards. Exceptional work. A version of me that looked, from the outside, exactly right. And something that never quite clicked. Not because the work wasn't good. It was. But intention dilutes at corporate scale. The care that goes into a concept thins out by the time it reaches the world. I kept making things for other people's stories, and somewhere in that — my own went quiet.

I didn't know what I was looking for. I just knew something was still ahead of me.

Then I became a mother.

And something cracked open.

*My son Monty came along in 2020 | Photo Credit* *Justyna Kulam*

I inherited my mother's sewing machine — she's been a seamstress for four decades, always working late into the night when we were young. The sound of her machine used to send me to sleep. When I pressed that pedal myself for the first time, something in me recognised it. Time folded. It felt like coming home.

I started making. Slowly at first, then with everything I had. And I began to understand something I hadn't been able to see before:

The sensitivity wasn't the problem. It never was. It was the instrument. ---

*Emotions in colour and form | commission details | 2024*

The ability to feel what others are carrying before they say it. To hold a story without judgment. To find the colour of a grief, the texture of a joy, the form of something that has lived inside someone for years without a name.

That's not a liability. That's the whole point.

I make sculptural textile commissions now. Each one begins with a conversation — where someone shares something private, something felt but unspoken. And I take what they've trusted me with and I make it real. Something that hangs on their wall. Something that holds what they told me, in a form only they can fully read.

I've spent my whole life receiving what people couldn't say out loud. It turns out that was never too much:

It was exactly enough.

If any of this resonates — if you've spent years being told you feel things too deeply — I'd love to hear from you. The stories I make are for people like us.

The Thing I Was Always Told Was Too Much

Introducing FORM_01: A Sustainable Love Story