Charged up

Being a designer is such a big part of my identity. But I feel a sense of impostor syndrome about it the way I don’t, let’s say, when I say I’m a writer.

I feel this way because I went to school to be classically trained in writing: creative writing, journalistic writing, academic writing. But I didn’t formally study design.

I still feel this way even though I design almost every day, whereas I don’t write as often as I would like. And by “every day,” I mean I’ve been designing almost every day since I was in high school, worked in one of the most design-forward companies in the world with other world-class designers early in my career, and have been designing professionally for almost 15 years.

Maybe it’s because writing has always felt more natural for me. The stakes feel lower and it’s genuinely something I do for fun. I look forward to writing, and it’s my escape. Design for me is my vocation, my craft, my profession. The stakes feel higher, because they are. It impacts a lot more people: people inside the companies I work for, the teams I lead, the customers it serves.

But maybe it’s time to retire these notions. I’m not more of one than the other. I’m both. And I will always be both. And both are intertwined with who I am. Not because I get a paycheck out of one of them. But because both is how I see the world, how I operate within it, how I move around it, how I make sense of it. I’m always designing in my head the way I’m always writing in my head. It might use a different part of my brain and one of these require much less effort, but it doesn’t take away that both are part of who I am in a deep, spiritual way.

It is a very visceral thing for me to write as it is for me to design. But there is still a difference, whereas writing is a very personal thing. I can care less what anyone thinks of my writing because I do it primarily for myself. Whereas design, by nature, I have to do it for the objective at hand: there’s a human problem, a business problem, a product problem I’m trying to solve.

But also, maybe I need to evolve my thinking of design and revert it back to how I really started to internalize it early in my life: that design is a moral obligation. It is a responsibility, as much as it is a craft. Or rather, it is a craft because it is a responsibility. Design is an expression as much as it is a part of my purpose.

My soul pulls on it because our world has to be designed, someone needs to think about the intentionality and gravity of our materials and experiences. Someone needs to really care about it and give a shit about it and feel it in their core. Someone has to fight the good fight even if the fight is exhausting or can feel heavy or be demoralizing at times. But that’s exactly the challenge at hand. It’s what makes it worth it.

Someone has to design. Might as well be me. Someone has to imagine things and make it come to life by any means necessary.

Someone has to write. Or all we get is all we’ve ever gotten. But the beauty of words is that it can have a life of its own. And words aren’t just a series of letterforms and vibrations, but they are a symphony that create new realities in someone else’s mind that travel through space and time.

Both are insanely amazing and beautiful. I’m proud to be both writer and designer.

Time to be both. Again. And again and again and again.

I’m charged up.