a return, with light
becoming
Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
I want to tell you what happened when the striking stopped.
I’ve been quiet here for a while.
The truth is, I didn’t know how to write when I couldn’t find the light. For much of the past year and a half, I was living inside a version of myself that felt increasingly unfamiliar. I was working in private equity — a world of rigor and discipline I chose deliberately, in a seat I was lucky to hold, alongside people I admired — but somewhere along the way, the pace began to quietly outsize everything else I loved. The gallery visits slowed. The paintings stopped. The words dried up. I wrote in my journal during the worst of it: How can one tame the light when there is only darkness? I shared a version of that line once before, in If to Love is to Want. What I didn’t share was how long the darkness actually lasted, or how deep it went. I didn’t write because I had nothing luminous to offer. And this has always been a space of luminosity.
What followed was not a straight line. It never is.
Last fall, I quit private equity. I spent a brief stint at an early-stage startup, building from zero alongside a long-time mentor. It was good work, with brilliant people, and I knew in my bones it was still a way station. On the side, I’d quietly begun apprenticing under Conway Liao at Hudson Wilder — learning, for the first time, the craft of creative direction from someone whose work I’d long studied. The creative desire that had always hummed beneath everything — the desire that made me start Taming the Light while working eighty-hour weeks — was no longer content to live in the margins.
So earlier this year, I made the leap.
In the month and a half since, I’ve found myself inhabiting a creative life I genuinely did not know was possible. I spent a week in Milan for Salone. I’m doing creative direction for a contemporary womenswear brand I deeply admire. I’m doing strategy and finance work for a luxury platform at the seam of design, commerce, and culture. I’m helping a storied design institution think about international expansion. Each of these sits at the intersection of the two things I care most about — the eye and the mind — and for the first time, I’m not compartmentalizing one to serve the other.
And more importantly, I’ve been working on something I want to share with you.
It’s called Aperçu, a publication curating the most interesting emerging brands and makers across design, fashion, art, and hospitality. It holds the two halves of how I see: the aesthetic and the commercial, the moodboard and the playbook. Aperçu is French for a first glimpse — the small recognition you have when you encounter something and know, immediately, that it matters. If Taming the Light was my private inquiry into beauty — marginalia in the margins of a demanding career — then Aperçu is what happens when the inquiry becomes the career itself. Same curatorial eye, same obsession with the considered detail, but held now to a higher editorial standard and given the space to breathe.
I’d love for you to come along. If anything you read here has ever resonated — the seeing, the love notes, the desire for beauty in all its quiet and cacophonous forms — Aperçu is where that spirit lives now.
I owe much of this to you.
Taming the Light was never just a newsletter — it was where I first practiced taking my own eye seriously. Many of you are strangers who found me on the internet and stayed, even through the long silence. Your every quiet like, every comment, every email saying please keep writing — I saw them all, even when I couldn’t bring myself to write back. They were small lights I carried. Thank you for waiting.
To my family, who never once flinched. To the friends and mentors who answered the late-night calls and held space for the version of me that wasn’t sure she’d find her way back — thank you. You are in every good thing I make.
And to Alex, who has loved me through it all — thank you. You are the brightest light.
Still becoming.
i haven't even read this yet; i was just so thrilled to see you in my inbox. you've been sorely missed, lyndsey. xx
Forever cheering you on! ❤️❤️❤️