A year with a new name

It has been a year since I announced, on Instagram and in my newsletter, that I was going by a new name: Jaq.

Last year, alone for the holidays at a friend’s off-grid cabin in Northern California, reluctantly yet doggedly undergoing the kind of transformation only accessible through grief, I realized I could not begin yet another year publicly tied to my old name. I had just written my new name inside the cover for my 2025 bullet journal, and I found myself mesmerized by the shape of the letters. I started re-writing it obsessively on bits of scrap paper, rotating the pieces to view it from various angles, trying different pens and different styles, capitalizing all the letters and then none of them, playing with the drama of the J and the Q.

It was like a high school crush, but I was my own new fixation. Or rather — a future me, a me I didn’t yet fully know, a hazy but alluring dream of who I might become. And as has often been the case in my life, it was the creative potential in this transformation that was both guide and purpose.

On the eve of another new year, as I reflect on how I lived and grew in 2025, I realize that the biggest change has been an unfamiliar and deep sense of calm, a quietness where once there was constant, almost frenzied whirring. Between the Adderall I began taking in March and the compounding sense that, through my name change and all that it ushered in, I had achieved/was achieving the self-actualization I’d been grasping at for years, 2025 was a year of quieting my brain, of rewiring my nervous system and finding that there is also creativity in peace.

This feels especially remarkable because it was also a year of such tremendous violence and fascism in the wider world and of heartbreak and deep financial/political insecurity for me and many of the people I love most. I lost thousands of followers and newsletter subscribers when I announced my name change, joining the ranks of many more I had been losing steadily over the last few years as I became more visibly queer. The fact that I felt more relief than fear from this mass exodus, despite its financial implications, was a clear sign that I was finally and at least doing the right thing, for me, if not for my business.

Which begs the question: what do you do with a business, with an audience, with a platform, in 2025 (about to be 2026), especially one that is so deeply tied to your personal identity, when you have no choice but to change or to call it quits? It seems to me that most sustainable businesses invest in their customer base by doing the same things again and again with consistency and predictability, even as their offerings evolve and improve. Yet despite my best efforts, so little in my life — business or personal — has been consistent or predictable these last few years.

A lot of what I did in 2025 under the expanded container of Jaq Studio was somewhat experimental — adding watercolor commissions and photography to my paid work, beginning to offer pre-recorded online classes, and designing and releasing more niche, technically advanced patterns (Hexy, Marble) that reflected my changing style, identity, and artistry.

Partly these new offerings were materially driven (how do I make money and support myself as a queer artist living in the bay), but also they were rooted in listening to my community and harnessing my skills to offer things that people need. Whether through patternmaking, watercolor, photography, or teaching, I have come to understand that my work is always rooted in helping people see themselves — lovingly, tenderly, fully and without shame.

A dear friend joked this year that I am the community wife — a joke in part because my friends know how much I want to find/be a wife, which is both funny (the gendered “wife” and all it implies, specifically) and a deep truth about my affinity for caregiving coupled with a longing for the kind of committed partnership that has so far alluded me. I spent the better part of 2025 in a kind, loving, poly relationship that ended in the best breakup I have ever had, and changed forever the way I relate to my own and others’ autonomy. I have been reflecting a lot on what care means, in and across community, beyond (often) fleeting romantic connections.

It does seem to me that my last few years were governed by my Cancer rising — feeling my feelings, homemaking and cooking, building family with queer beloveds near and far — and now I find my Aquarius sun reemerging on the creative horizon of all my personal growth. Aquarius, the wateriest of the air signs, is so often associated with detachment and independence, but in my life, I have felt my Aquarius sun amplify the depth of care I feel as a Cancer rising, expanding from the personal to the communal, guiding my work and my purpose in the world. I enter this new year grounded in myself and my community with more certainty than I have ever known before, and with tremendous hope for all we are building and fighting for together.

I worry that I overuse the word gratitude in my writing (blog, newsletters, instagram) — not because I am not grateful, but because the repetition might make it seem cached, insincere. When I say I am grateful, I mean that the life I get to live has defied my wildest dreams for what I once thought available to me as a fat queer artist living under capitalism, and that the support of people who read my words, knit my patterns, take my classes, and commission me for watercolor and photography, is what allows me to keep doing it.

I am so deeply and immeasurably grateful, and I will continue to repeat it, like a broken record, at the end of every newsletter and every blog post.

With love and GRATITUDE,