Career Change Helped Me Understand My Parents
My mother stayed home with the kids and spent much of my youth making art and volunteering her time in early education settings, and my father worked in STEM for as long as I can remember, first in the military and then outside it. From a young age, I saw this dynamic and struggled with accepting the dichotomy, between my parents and within myself. I was a sensitive child who wanted to be accepted, loved, and respected no matter what I was interested in. But I learned that in my family the only way to be respected was to leave the house every day to do a white collar job and bring home steady money. Volunteering didn’t earn much respect within the immediate and extended family units (on both sides). I learned that spending time with kids was not respected while not spending time with kids was respected.
To stay true to my artistic side but still have the potential to earn respect by going out and bringing home money, I started thinking about career early on in life. With the help of my mother, I started exploring career options and decided on graphic design. In my family, college is the first step to getting that white collar job that earns respect. I was going to go to college, study design, and then work a job in it where I collaborate at an office in a big city and finally feel important. My mother would respect my art and my father would respect my self-sufficiency.
I did those things… sort of. The pandemic may have been the redirection I needed. I went to college, studied design, and then fled back home where I struggled to find an important and respected job that used what I learned. But I found sparks of happiness where I never would have thought to look; I was doing things that didn’t earn respect by my family’s unspoken standards, but brought me the balance I needed to get through a tough time. Later, through a stroke of luck, I did land respected office job. It was remote at first (thank you, pandemic), but I was clocking in to do office-worker stuff at a company laptop where I put together presentations, emailed people, and had meetings. Very important. Very respected.
Though it started remote unlike the office jobs my family had before me, I was finally able to communicate with my father almost like an equal. As he had been in managerial positions for a while, I could say things like “quarterly report,” “compliance,” and “that should’ve been an email” and we could bond. I was starting to understand the stress and monotony my father had been feeling for decades what with office politics and trying to stay useful enough to stay in employ. What a strange and stressful world he had been living in! Yet, he was able to stay in it and climb those zig-zag ladders so he could support the family. I got it. Just because my father had been doing it for so long did not mean it was easy. Far from it! The mental toll of that kind of work was grueling because it was nearly invisible until it compiled into an unbearable weight. Poor dad.
That office job did not last for me. I was able to go back to the things that kept me happy, working with wine and making art; and in the meantime, I kept looking for full-time work to pay the bills. By another stroke of luck, I found a place in something I didn’t ever anticipate going into since it was the kind of work my mother and her mother did while I was growing up: early childhood education. I had already been deconstructing my internalized misogyny towards it since I was interested in pedagogy after teaching adults for a while (andragogy lacks joy), and I’m getting to finish that deconstruction as I continue to grow in the field. At the point that this path was presented to me, I was ready to accept it and try it in earnest.
Once I started in the early learning setting, I could talk with my mother about work. I could tell her stories about the kids and their triumphs and struggles and ask her what she did in similar situations. She recommended sensory toys, suggested ways to gently discipline, and shared in the joy and difficulty that comes with being a strong, safe space for young children. I realized how hard it must have been for her to balance her own mental health journey with being the grown-up for so many kids, how much of a positive impact she got to have on young kids and how few fellow adults got to recognize her achievements with that. Childcare is work. Early education is work. It’s tough work. It can send you home crying one day from overwhelm, and the next day can be full of precious moments you hope you never forget.
I understand my parents’ individual struggles a little better since getting to experience fields each of them could relate to. My father must have struggled with transitioning from the office to home, switching from manager to father; my mother must have struggled with not feeling respected for the important work she does, and balancing her time between being a teacher and being mom. I am grateful for the opportunity to experience a piece of their lives firsthand so I can understand my parents more. The career changes I’ve gone through have been worth the chance to get into their heads, even a little. I’ve been able to see and feel some of their identity struggles, work struggles, and personal struggles because I feel a bit of it too. I also have a better sense of what they each value in themselves and others just based on their work and their attitudes towards it. I’m in the middle of understanding my own values, but it helps to know where they might unwittingly come from. So far, I value a bit of what each my parents value—knowledge, discovery, joy, helping others, and expression. I don’t think I would have known that about myself if I hadn’t gotten to know my parents first, and I have my career change to thank for the insight.
Dating Made It Impossible to Write Romance… and I Want to Write It Again
Before I begin, a note on my perspective: I am a young adult cis woman alluding to the cis-het experience. I’m going to talk about writing romance, not love. I won’t touch on love, since love is a tougher concept to pin down.
When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot. I wrote stories and fanfictions all throughout my youth, almost all involving romance. With that in mind, I have a problem: I haven’t been able to write a single romance since I started dating many years ago.
What is “Romance” and Why Do I Care?
When a noun, one of Google’s definitions of romance is “a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.” The other definition is “a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.” One of the noun definitions concerns more than one person, the other noun definition can be a solitary experience. I like both and I adore reading stories about both. However, the one I understand less and less the more I date is the first one, the one associated with love. Perhaps that is why I have been gravitating towards romance novels when choosing audiobooks to keep me company while I cook, clean, and do other tasks that don’t require my whole brain. Once upon a time I could write romance into the stories I created. Once upon a time, romance was something I could grasp and put on the page. Sort of. After that act became difficult, I realized I care whether I’ll be able to write romance again because I want to be capable of the full scope of human emotion; I want to be capable of letting other people affect me. I want to interact and react. I want sparks and explosions. I want to let myself feel and then I want to people I trust and let in to push the bounds of my feelings so I’m not experiencing my emotions alone anymore.
“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.” – The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
I care about romance in books because to me, writing is like a conscious “testing scenarios” experience. There is a common idea that dreams are the brain’s way of testing out situations, actions, and consequences in a safe place. To me, writing is my waking brain doing that very action. I want to test the ideas because I want to hope they’ll be part of my own life. However, if they never end up in my own life, I want to at least know that I got to experience them dynamically in my mind. Not only do I want to stop being afraid of feeling things, I want to stop being afraid of imagining things as well.
What’s Making It So Hard to Write Romance—Specifically?
It’s not exciting anymore when someone shows interest
I remember when it was exciting if someone showed interest in me, and I could write about that feeling with the same youthful gaiety. But now that I’ve dated more than I care to, I can’t see that spark of joy in easy romance anymore. I can’t picture romance with someone now that I feel like I’ve exhausted the basics. Beyond the basic, romance in real life is messy and faulty and subject to the whims of human disfunction. This was something I was always vaguely aware of, but now its deeply ingrained and left me quite jaded. Butterflies are easy and fleeting, that being fem-presenting even when you’re not “a ten” means most cis-het men will show interest even if it’s for a moment, being called beautiful is not the glowing compliment to an adult woman that it is to a teenage girl (cue the Swan Princess’s, “thank you. But what else?”), and interest from someone does not equate to a relationship. I have realized that what you want when you’re young is to be seen, but once you’re older… that’s nothing. You’re tired, you’ve been seen enough, and you just want something that stays. You can’t write romance when you’re tired.
In real life, romantic partners don’t fall into your lap
Not only am I tired from the experience, but I have discovered another thing about romance in literature versus real life that has made it difficult to put romance on the page: romance in novels usually doesn’t start because the heroine is looking for a lover—quite the opposite, in fact—the heroine often shirks love and it sneaks into her life persistently and unexpectedly (as if romance is inescapable); however, in real life once a heroine passes a certain age, romance is something she must seek out intentionally. Ideal romantic partners don’t fall in her lap in the real world. To further iterate on the issue of finding a romantic partner, the post-modern age has brought on dating site and then the dating app. People don’t end up on those by accident; being on those sites is a deliberate choice. So, the whirlwind romantic experience of accidentally falling in love doesn’t occur. Real people must be open to the idea of romance and go out to find it.
Now I Know What’s Up, What Tactics Do I Use to Write Romance Again?
After determining why I care about writing romance and what’s making it difficult to do so, I don’t know for certain which tactics to employ so I can put pen to paper again; but I have a few ideas.
If I can’t see romance how I did when I was younger, I can no longer connect to the storylines I gravitated towards back then. If those tropes and experiences are no longer exciting to me, I need to figure out what could be exciting now.
(At this point while writing this, I did have a mini existential crisis over not finding joy in connecting to other people and wondering if I’ll ever be able to find the same level of joy that I once did and hoping beyond all hope that the feeling was extremely temporary and I can find joy in connection to others again because if I can’t, I will be extremely sad. But enough about that.)
To write as prolifically as I did in my teen years, I need to figure out which moments of connection brought me joy and why. I can reflect on the connections that lit me up and stop worrying about whether they were romantic or not. I will write better stories when I relish in all the ways people are wonderful. There is joy in connecting with another person through conversation, activity, or silence—just co-existing on the same wavelength for a moment—because people are usually good and seek connection, even when the stars don’t exactly align. People seek connection and connection builds stories. Perhaps I can write a romance again if I focus less on the butterflies of being seen and more on the deeper, soulful yearning for a partner to share hearts and minds.
Romance isn’t in the fleeting glances, the chase, or the kiss anymore… it’s in the moments that two hearts and minds meet in the middle. I need to dream about the new romance and hope for it, and that’s a scary thing to do for someone who doesn’t have a clear picture of what the new dream/hope of romance should look like.
New romance needs to grow and mature with me. I’ll start with what I know, even if I don’t have the whole picture.
Now when I write about romantic connection, it won’t include these:
Fleeting glances
“You’re so beautiful”s
Accidental touches (my characters will be adults. They know what they’re doing.)
Excessive touches
Possessiveness
Protectiveness
Enemies to lovers (no matter how much I love that trope. I just can’t see how it translates to healthy, mature romance.)
When I write about romantic connection from now on it will include some or all of these:
Passionate eye-contact
Apt listening
Making time together
Making promises and keeping them, or at least trying really hard to
Saying “I love you” and showing it
Being a support system for each other
Weathering storms
Boundaries
Hopefully these tactics work. If they don’t, I can always revisit it again later.
Writing romance is tough right now, but maybe that’s because I need to dream of something that matches where I want to be next and stop dwelling on what used to be. I’ll give it my best and see what I come up with.
“Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel[.]” – Oscar Wilde
References:
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. (1994). The Swan Princess [DVD].
Wilde, O. (2003). The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin Classics.
Wilde, O., & Ellmann, R. (1998). The artist as critic: Critical writings of oscar wilde. University of Chicago Press.
I Traveled Solo and Faced My Loneliness
I’m going to be cliché when I say that traveling by yourself is a rewarding experience. Though, I don’t call solo travel rewarding because of the romantic self-discovery and potentially aesthetic photo ops—no, if you’ve seen wanderlust vlogs, those are tired. For me, traveling solo was rewarding because it forced me to fully feel and accept the growing loneliness in my life.
One layoff, one failed engagement, and no place to live lined up, I felt more lost than ever before. So, like anyone living post-”Eat, Pray, Love,” I booked a trip. In my case, I found a women’s art therapy retreat to attend in France and decided to see a little more of the country before going back home. I felt pieces of myself were broken and missing, but I had not yet admitted that I needed love and togetherness at some point to finish mending my broken heart—hell, I didn’t like that I had a heart to break.
I started the path to healing when I booked a spot at the art therapy retreat. The retreat was all about acknowledging our fears and our sadness, letting go of the need for control, opening ourselves up to what was actually important, and opening to love. The love part was particularly difficult for me for… reasons. But, I got to feel all those things with a group of women each facing their own demons. We felt it all together. There were ample tears of sadness, joy, and laughter, and plenty of hugs to go around. We threw into a fire what was holding us back and screamed to the sky in catharsis. God, it felt good. Although, all that opening up left me a little raw and timid of continuing a trip that would require more of my scarce fortitude. I was afraid of getting lost, running out of money sooner than intended, looking ridiculous and out of place, and… and of being alone.
Being afraid of being alone was a new feeling for me. But, like I mentioned earlier, before going on this trip, the loneliness had been building. I was in a bad spot and the retreat made me admit that despite my history of craving space. I was an introvert! I didn’t need people! I had long lamented my lack of alone time coming from a big family and not having been self-sufficient during my early twenties. I wanted this time alone. I wanted to be alone. I loved taking myself out on dates! But, I’d started to feel differently and that feeling was only amplified when I left the safety of the art retreat.
Everywhere I went in France, I saw people being together. Public spaces were gathering places and almost nobody ate alone. In Rennes, university students were together. In Bordeaux, people gathered after work for apero and boisterously enjoyed each others’ company. (Many an unironic “ooh la la” and “oh lo lo” were thrown about.) Even in Paris where the pace of life felt faster, people would often be in pairs. Yet, there I was, occupying café tables by myself, soaking in everything without understanding much except that they were in community with each other and I was just passing through. My journal became my lifeline because it gave me something to interact with and made it at least appear to those around me that I was completely comfortable with my solo status—like I was used to being when I was at home. I was reeling from life changes, in an unfamiliar place, and feeling pretty raw from the retreat after admitting I wanted love, so I finally felt really lonely. However, I’m glad I felt that severity of loneliness. I’m glad I got to know it well because it motivated me to seek out togetherness and savor it. When I got back to Paris towards the end of my trip, I sought to meet up with other solo travelers through hostel chats. I enjoyed being with people and making friends, and I really appreciated their company. I even met up with people I knew from back home who happened to be traveling alone at the same time as me. We agreed it was wonderful to get out and see more of the world, but that we wished we could share more of the journey with someone else. I went to a concert at an art collective and talked to other people first. I loved it. I was finally on the up because I’d faced my feelings, accepted them instead of seeing them as weakness, and sought community as part of the healing process.
When I arrived back at home, my problems didn’t go away. I still needed full-time work, I still had closure that needed to happen with my ex, and I still needed a new place to live. But my mental state was on the mend because I let myself feel scared and lonely without feeling lesser for having those feelings. I don’t have any solutions for the loneliness that ensues when you travel by yourself because you kind of have to feel it to appreciate when you’re in community with others. But I can say that feeling lonely is okay, it’s not forever, and you might need to travel solo to understand how it affects you, too.
Emotional Laboring
In March of 2024, I was still out of work and looking for quick gigs between applications to try and stay afloat. Through a flyer on my ex’s car, I found one. I thought that getting around twenty-five dollars per hour was a great rate for a gig, but I quickly realized that to be enticed into that job again, I would need at least fifty. It was the most emotionally taxing job I have ever done. Before beginning, I didn’t think I’d ever work as a petitioner, and after ending the day, I don’t think I ever will again. I finished that long day drenched in sweat, covered in exhaust fumes, and trying not to cry until I was safely home.
The Most Emotionally Taxing Gig I’ve Ever Had and the Reasons Why
Before getting into why the job drained me so, I am going to explain the job without explicitly stating what I was petitioning for, to set the stage. For one day, I was petitioning to get Female Bodily Autonomy on the state’s ballot so it could be voted into state law. I was lucky I believed in the cause myself (because petitioners for hire don’t know what they’re going to petition for until they get to the interview), but that didn’t make it any less easy. I never would have assumed that one day of a job could be so difficult. I honestly thought I was stronger than that. But after thinking about why I was so drained, I decided that you’d have to be abnormally detached or already armed with training to endure this kind of work.
Engaging with Strangers on Divisive Topics
I had to engage with strangers, one after the other, on the heated and divisive topic of Female Bodily Autonomy to get enough valid signatures to fill my campaign-mandated quota for the day. I had to pursue people in a grocery store parking lot (without permission from the grocery store to be there, mind you, so I could go no closer to the store than the parking lot) and ask them to sign for Female Bodily Autonomy to be on the state ballot; but I was actually asking them was “Are you with us or against us?” I did not have the chance to stop and talk with them, exchange stories, collect new insight, or bridge gaps empathetically because once I gotten their signature I was supposed to move on to the next person. After all, I had a quota to fill. The nature of the job mandated I move fast and constantly. For every person I engaged, I was either the embodiment of their ideals or their devil incarnate, and I just had to live with that because there was no time for me to show them I valued their humanity and that I was human too.
Employing Tactics of Manipulation
As I mentioned earlier, I was petitioning to get Female Bodily Autonomy on the state ballot (with the ultimate goal of local citizens voting it into law). I faced many dissenters in my pursuit of signatures, so, I was given a clever tactic to get them to sign the petition too. It went like this:
Me: Sign here to get Female Bodily Autonomy on the ballot!
Stranger: No, I’m against Female Bodily Autonomy.
Me: By signing to get this on the ballot, you will have the opportunity to vote against it.
Reactions went one of two ways…
Stranger: Oh, yeah. I’ll sign so I can vote “no.”
Or
Stranger: No, I don’t even want it on the ballot.
There were more colorful responses that I wish I felt safe enough to share here, but that was the gist of what I encountered. It did feel not great.
Being Let In on Frightening Thought Patterns
While I did not feel particularly good about employing a manipulation tactic, I felt fear and apprehension toward individuals I would consider neighbors and fellow community members after becoming privy to their thought patterns and steadfast biases. If the manipulation tactic worked, I learned that while they do not want Female Bodily Autonomy written into law, they respect the democratic process enough to risk it. If the tactic did not work, I learned that they were so against Female Bodily Autonomy that they were willing to bypass the entire democratic process for the sake of their ideals. I must admit that realization scared me. From my perspective, I was seeing their inner demon rear its ugly head. It’s frightening to see the monster in your fellow man and realize my fellow man sees me as a monster, too.
Contending with Religion
I do need to add that not all dissenters who wanted to bypass the democratic process to keep this issue out of the ballot did so with nasty commentary and hostility towards myself. Some of them were almost saintly in their refusal.
The most common reason I have found for people to be against Female Bodily Autonomy is religion. I am familiar with weaponizing religion as a tool for oppression, but it’s difficult to contend with it over and over again when the people using it to oppress have convinced themselves what they are doing is right and just. Moreover, when religion was the reason for dissent, those individuals often wanted to engage with me, find out my religion, preach to me, and change my heart. Since I was out there to engage quickly and “efficiently”, I was not ready to be the subject of evangelization—and yet I was. I was emotionally moved by a few individuals, but it did not change my stance. I still believed what I believed. Nonetheless, it was a lot to endure even if it was out of what the other individual felt to be love.
No Place to Rest
Being emotionally drained can physically drain me. During particularly rough bouts of depression, I want to sleep more, sit more, and engage in general bed rot. Outside, in that grocery store parking lot with a clipboard and pen in hand, and no chair in sight, I was drained. I would perch on curbs for brief moments, but there was nowhere for me to sit out of the sun and away from people so I could take my petitioner mask off. My feet hurt, I was sunburned, I was sweaty, and I was coated in a thin layer of grime from walking between cars all day. It was taxing spending eight hours in a place designed for cars, not people. I couldn’t even take myself home right away. I had to wait to get picked up along with my fellow petitioners since we had all dispersed from one car.
I was relieved to get to my car and have a respite from the sun, soot, and other’s emotions. I was tired of being heroized, demonized, or preached to. I was tired of feeling out of place, exposed, and unable to rest. I was tired of feeling separate from humanity by representing an issue.
Applying My Reflections on That Day to Other Jobs
When I got home that evening, I cried. I cried and called my team lead and said I couldn’t go back. She was disappointed since I had gotten so many signatures but understood why I couldn’t do it again. I was done. I took a long shower that night and let it all out.
A couple of days later, I began to reflect on the specific reasons petitioning had been so hard on me. I realized it wasn’t the first emotionally taxing job I’d had, but it was the first one that took so much out of me in the shortest amount of time.
I pondered other emotionally taxing jobs: teacher, therapist, emergency responder, caretaker, healthcare worker. Then I added to that list: political activist, spiritual leader, petitioner… All these jobs involve working with people when they’re vulnerable or risking having to engage with their intense emotions and personal demons.
Now when I look at jobs, I ask myself questions about them. Could the nature of the job leave me isolated? Could I handle that, or do I need the company of others to get the work done? I look at the company culture. Have they created an environment humans could thrive, or do they sacrifice the worker for exponential profits? I look to see if expectations are clear or if there’s too much vagueness that could result in spinning gears, misunderstood expectations, and a lack of progress ending with the feeling of defeat. Could I handle that vagueness and give it structure or could I end up feeling disempowered and defeated? Does the job come with support from others, or will it be a lot for one person? All the questions I ask myself are to help me determine if I am up to the emotional labor of that job. The only way to find out for sure is to do it, but now I try to mentally prepare.
I never thought I would work as a petitioner, but I am glad I did it because it awakened me to the importance of acknowledging the emotional labor of laboring. It made me realize we need to factor that into our searches, and how we work with people, and normalize discussing it so we can see each other as entire beings rather than job titles. We need to talk about what makes a job hard so we can help each other cope, safeguard our sanity, and maintain our humanity in the systems we exist within. Despite the longstanding culture of keeping emotions outside the office, jobs are emotional because the people who do them are emotional creatures and that’s okay.
Finding Focus— The Two Kinds of Focus
I have a hard time focusing. I am not only fighting my own mental battles each time I must will myself into completing a task but also fighting tendencies trained into me by short-form content and dopamine-rush media platforms. Things were easier when I was a child and those influences weren’t in existence… but here we are. As an adult, I am training myself to focus again, and along the way I have discovered that there are two kinds of focus each with the potential for the flow state: half-brain and whole-brain. The way I need to think/the focus mode I need to tap into depends on the task I am encountering. I have a feeling my experience exploring the two kinds of focus, how to invoke them, and how to deal with distractions, is relatable to more people beyond myself so I’m going to break down what I have discovered into actionable steps. First, let me explain what I mean by “half-brain focus” and “whole-brain focus.”
Half-brain focus works best for rote tasks or familiar tasks. You channel it to complete a series of tack welds, run computations in a spreadsheet, prep a canvas for painting, clean and prepare an espresso machine, commit a series of numbers or dates or definitions to short-term memory, and so forth. Half-brain focus is best wielded in short bursts or for a set round of tasks.
Whole-brain focus is far less structured but still requires mental acuity, hence, it can be a little more difficult to invoke. Whereas half-brain focus is like flipping a switch in the brain, whole-brain focus is like turning on a plane— there are a few more switches, knobs, and dials involved. Whole-brain focus is for whole-brain activities: writing, the preliminary sketch for a painting, deciding how to illustrate data sets, coming up with a marketing campaign, et cetera. This kind of focus also has the potential to be sustained for long periods, which is helpful because it often takes longer to accomplish more (or any) of that sort of task.
I am going to share hypothetical examples of tasks I would do and break down how I prepare each kind of focus mode for them.
Focus Mode 1— Half-Brain Focus: Formatting a Spreadsheet
Determine the task at hand. Before doing anything, I need to know what I am trying to do in the first place. In this instance, I am trying to format a spreadsheet. Check.
Prepare my environment. Before doing a task, I need to have everything necessary within arm’s reach to complete said task, and everything that I might break away from said task to get (water, tea, a snack, music, et cetera). This will keep me from having to break focus by going on little errands here and there. Preparing a space for a task also has a ritualistic bend to it that helps center the body and mind. In this case, I know I’ll need: a computer, an internet connection, chargers and access to power, a notebook and pencil for any stray thoughts, a hot drink (tea helps me think), headphones, a pre-determined playlist (so I don’t waste thirty minutes picking the perfect playlist), a comfortable desk and chair, quick access to good light (so I don’t fall asleep or become lethargic), and my devices set to “Do Not Disturb” so no glaring notifications are battling for my attention.
Set my parameters. Sitting down to do something that has no definitive end can be mentally taxing, especially if the task at hand is one I’m not looking forward to. It’s vital to pre-determine my bandwidth and set stopping points accordingly. I give myself a window of time within which the task needs to be done and break that down. In this case, formatting a spreadsheet is what I would consider a one-hour task. However, within that one hour, I will use Pomodoro cycles to complete the task.
Recite to myself my goal. This may feel like step one, but I feel the task at hand and the goal is slightly different. The task is what must be done, but the goal is what I have committed to doing. My task is formatting a spreadsheet, but my goal is to have that spreadsheet formatted for navigability within an hour. Repeating to myself what I am preparing to do right before I do it tells my mind that my time will be spent well.
Get started. After going through the above-mentioned I should be ready to invoke half-brain focus, but it won’t snap into place until I start the task at hand. I gain momentum the more I do something, and my focus settles in once I’ve gained momentum.
That’s how to invoke half-brain focus. Now let’s look at how to snag the elusive whole-brain focus.
Focus Mode 2— Whole-Brain Focus: Sketching for an Infographic
Determine the task at hand. Same as half-brain, I need to determine what it is I am setting out to do. In this case, I am sitting down to sketch an infographic. I am not creating a finished product, only the first draft of the infographic.
Prepare my environment. I find this step to be infinitely more crucial when coaxing out that whole-brain focus. Like half-brain focus, I gather everything I might need or want to get the task done and be comfortable as I do so. When sketching, I like to have a notebook or copy paper, writing utensils such as pencil and pen, a scanner, and whatever else I can get my hands on to use to draw. Even dirt counts as a medium. Beyond what I want to mark a page, I like to be wearing comfortable clothes that allow me to contort into whatever strange positions help my focus, water and hot tea, and inspirational music.
Gather sources of power. Sources of power are also known as inspiration and that task’s raison d’être. Depending on the project, what might bring me the power to ideate and create can vary. When I am preparing to sketch infographic ideas my sources of power are the data I’m trying to represent and a mood board that matches the vibe.
Set my parameters. Again, when it comes to whole-brain focus, this step is of vital importance. Blissfully, once I have achieved the coveted whole-brain focus I can find myself hyper fixating. This can be bad when there are other things to do like make important phone calls, pause to eat, meet deadlines, et cetera. I try to determine ahead of time what constitutes as “done,” when I absolutely need to stop and take a breather, or—if I’m forcing the creative focus and it just feels like constipation—I’m allowed to take a break.
Recite to myself my goal. Again, I am differentiating between the task at hand and my goal for it. In this example, my goal is “to come up with three viable infographic options and sketch each concept.”
Clear my mind of all that does not serve my momentary goal. I meditate shortly to purge internal distractions or train myself to let thoughts happen and then let them go. It is usually when the mind needs quiet that it finds the most noise within itself, and this noise is distracting. When doing a half-brain task, I can usually tolerate and function with this noise in place, but when doing a whole-brain task it completely detracts from the entire endeavor. I learned to clear my mind of distractions through Headspace’s guided meditations. They call it “Noting.” Check the references at the end of this post for more information on noting.
Get started. I’ve prepared my space and prepared my mind, now I need to gain momentum so creative flow comes in.
Focus, half-brain or whole-brain, is a muscle that requires exercise lest it atrophy. I try not to beat myself up when I struggle to focus, even after preparing my body and mind to do so. When I find myself becoming distracted and can’t bring back the focus, five techniques work for me.
Combatting Distraction— Five Techniques
Three-minute mediation. If I find my mind going to everything except the task at hand, I put it down and sit back for three minutes of breathwork and “noting.” That usually calms my mind enough to come back to the task at hand and then the focus can settle back in.
White noise. A lot of times it’s the world around me that can pull me from a reverie. When this happens, the best I can do is put the blinders on and pretend the outside world isn’t there.
Go for a walk. Being antsy can get in the way of my focus flow. Going on a walk can clear my mind, make me feel like I didn’t miss out on the day/the world outside, and allow me to settle when I sit down again.
Doodle aimlessly. Doodling is actually marvelous for the mind. I feel like it permits me to tune out for a bit. That short brain break can often be enough reprieve to recharge the focus batteries.
Make a drink. Hot chocolate, lemonade, coffee, tea… it doesn’t matter so much what it is so long as there’s a bit of prep involved. The process of moving my hands to gather tea leaves, boil water, find a cup, et cetera, gives me an active brain break and then a lovely warm drink to take back to my task.
I hope that my experiences prove insightful for you and your journey because activating focus is tough! The important part is that you practice. The more you exercise your focus muscles, the easier it’ll become. Maybe you’ll even achieve the coveted Flow State…
Or just throw everything out the window and operate on riding random focus highs whenever they strike, no matter how inconvenient.
References
Puddicombe, Andy. “What the Noting Technique Is, and How to Take Advantage of It.” Headspace, 13 Oct. 2023, www.headspace.com/articles/noting-technique-take-advantage.
Pillay, Srini. “The ‘Thinking’ Benefits of Doodling.” Harvard Health Publishing, 15 Dec. 2016, www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-thinking-benefits-of-doodling-2016121510844.
Thanks for reading :)
Thanks for reading :)
Finding Joy in Creation Again
I felt something happen to me the longer I spent disassociating from my design work. It became easier to accept criticism, but it became harder to find that spark of inspiration to make a project great. I wasn’t enjoying the process of creating things and I could feel myself falling into the deep, dark Pit of Blanding. (As an aside, if you are unfamiliar with blanding, according to author Andrea Belk Olson, it is this: “the copy-paste model of consumer product development and brand marketing that follows repetitive patterns in the name of modernity but at the expense of authenticity and originality. With results that are, in a word, bland.”) The Pit of Blanding may not be the most glamorous place, but I could settle in there. That’s all I’d do in those moments. Settle. The longer I separated myself from my design, the more I’d settle. I had to stop being complacent and work at finding the spark of joy I used to get whenever I engaged in the processes of creation and design.
To find joy in creation again, I pulled out my favorite art materials (a sketchbook and stamp-carving tools), armed myself with simple concepts (favorite phrases and basic imagery that correlates), and sat down to move my hand until my brain caught up. The phrase I chose to explore was “memento mori.” It’s a very fitting Latin phrase that means “Remember you must die.” It is ominous but serves as a reminder that nothing is permanent, and you must live as well as you can each moment you have. That phrase speaks to me in moments of stagnation; hence I picked it when I was feeling creatively stuck.
After I have chosen a concept to explore, I always start in the physical dimension even when creating something that will briefly translate to the digital. Normally I sketch at least two pages of concepts before taking a design to the next stage, but this instance was unusual, I was finding joy in creation again, and I only sketched two concepts before ultimately finding I was happy with my first one.
Next, I transferred the pencil drawing to soft rubber and carved out the stamp. This step might be the most meditative of a creative process. Unfortunately, I got so into the process that I forgot to take any pictures of me carving the actual stamp. While that is a detriment to documentation, it is a sign that I was finding joy in creation again! Flow was coming back to me.
My stamp was complete and all I needed to do was use it! Wielding a stamp in one hand and an ink pad in the other, I let loose on some sheets of Bristol paper. This stamping action was another step that lent itself well to getting lost in creation. Ink, place, press, lift… and so on.
The final part of this project brought me to the computer. It was time to take what I had made and “finish” it. Creating the stamp and stamping it on paper did not feel like all that I could do. I felt there was more potential for this stamp than just to collect dust in my box of hand-carved stamps. The first step for bringing my physical art into the digital realm was scanning it. I carefully fed each piece of paper with the various iterations of my “memento mori” stamp through my printer’s scanner. I collected the imagery at three hundred dpi to zoom in on every bit of texture and every “imperfection” that comes with making something by hand. I didn’t want to lose the heart of this art or else it would defeat the exercise of finding joy in creating again. I opened each image in Photoshop and was pleased with my source material. It was time to edit.
The important part is that through each change I made I got closer to the finished design and felt good while doing it.
The process of futzing with a design in the digital realm is a lot less interesting if you’re not the one doing the futzing, so I won’t go into terrible detail about each step involved or every adjustment layer/deletion/scale/color change that my source stamp imagery went through. But! The important part is that through each change I made I got closer to the finished design and felt good while doing it. I didn’t think about how it would be received by someone else, nor did I stop and scrap everything because it was deviating too much from something tried and true, and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make it look finished if I pursued something so different. I came out with one design in six variations and decided how I wanted that design to be implemented: as stickers! And it felt good. I felt good. I made something punchy and was joyful while I did so.
I don’t know if I got that spark of joy back because I did something creative without a plan, because I entered a meditative state while engaging in the process, because it was a design for me first, or just because I made a conscious choice to feel good about creating and designing again; but I got it back. In the future when I feel myself getting detached from my work again, perhaps I’ll go back to my roots and just engage in a process of creation—hands first, mind second—because ultimately there is joy in it, and I deserve to feel that about what I make.
Please enjoy photos of my process (that I remembered to take), and check out my “Memento Mori” stickers on Redbubble using the link below!
Belk Olson, Andrea. “Why Brands Are Blanding.” LinkedIn, 27 Oct. 2022, www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-brands-blanding-andrea-belk-olson-msc/.
Thanks for reading! :)
Thanks for reading! :)
Rebranding myself — Part I
As someone who grew up with the dawning of social media, I am no stranger to branding oneself. Individuals brand themselves every day with their choice of attire, music, language, and more. Some people are aware that is what they are doing when they tag themselves with buzzwords such as “romancecore” or “pastel goth,” but others make their personal branding choices subconsciously when they decide which water bottle to buy or which clothes to wear each day. For better or for worse, I as a designer, have become acutely aware of personal branding from two fronts: personal style and personal design.
Personal style is something that lives with me everywhere I go, but a personal design is something I have to curate to show others how I work and what sorts of things I can create. I need to create a branded image for myself as a designer that incorporates my tastes while working with the constraints of the digital realm because computers are king. This means that what I design needs to scale without losing quality or legibility and needs to be simple enough not to bog a machine.
I am afraid that it will end up the same way well-known companies end up after an image refresh: a reversion to the old and the recognizable or a regression to the mean. To avoid this fate, I drew from my tastes.
I need to create a branded image for myself as a designer that incorporates my tastes while working with the constraints of the digital realm.
My artistic tastes were formed in my youth by what I have coined “dirtbag artists” of desert communities. After schooling, I gravitated towards the Arts and Crafts movement of the late eighteen-hundreds, the anti-design movement that started in the '60s, and the roughness of the punk movement and the grunge movement. However, I was trained as a graphic designer to create a finished product— that constraint does not mesh well with the rough and raw images that I crave. This leaves me in a conundrum: do I work with my tastes and risk looking untrained or do I distill my tastes to fit what looks “finished”? To solve my design problem while navigating my conundrum, I just needed to start designing.
Step 1
Here is an iteration of my first logo-ified name:
I drew my inspiration from the elegance of my name, the more romantic curves that are found as part of the Arts and Crafts movement, and my unabashed love of brown and beige (because those colors remind me of dirt and I like dirt). This iteration felt good for a time until I realized that while my name is elegant, I am not. I am… rougher than that.
Step 2
Going back to my artistic roots, I got my hands dirty. Here is a collection of stamps I carved intuitively. For this round, I focused on nothing but feeling and my desire to create, create, create. I was pleased with the texture of it all but concerned about legibility and its capacity to vectorize for scalability on digital screens.
Step 3
I went back to the computer. This time I kept it simple and just typed my name. Over and over again. In lots of different typefaces that I enjoy. I asked people who knew me well to highlight which typefaces they thought were most like me. These were what was highlighted.
Since I chose all the typefaces originally, I went with the option that had the most consensus. It was then time to give it my personal touch. I carved it into a stamp.
I am at an impasse again, though. I am facing the same issue I did with previous stamps: their capacity for vectorization. I gave the scan of this stamp a few tries. However, the problem remains that the texture of this stamp is too complex for it to be a good vector graphic. There is just too much information for the translation to be practical.
It is back to the drawing board for me, but in the meantime, I am distilling my branding to purely my name.
Thank you for reading :)
Thank you for reading :)
A new chapter
A new chapter in my digital expression…
When I moved into my new home, the blank walls called on me to fill them with all the things that made me happy. Soon I was nailing bookshelves, paintings, and string lights where there was once just plaster. But there were two different Me’s seeking to exact it’s will upon the space: Pinterest Me whose sole desire was to model the place after a mood board dubbed “Alessandracore” and only let items which fit that visual vibe in, and Practical Me who said it was better to use what we had and make the space fit for all our interests and activities to occupy. Practical Me argued that Pinterest wasn’t going to live in the space, we were. Ultimately, Pinterest Me conceded to Practical Me on this one but did come to appreciate the brand-new mood board we created in real life with what we had.
I liken my new home to all spaces that are mine, now. That’s why I’ve decided to change how I use my website! On this site I will share (intermittently) the projects which I endeavor—design, art, writing, and more. I do a lot of things and I’d like to share them. So, here’s to a new chapter in digital expression!