✨ Are you sure that's what you want?

Who we are after we let go of all the things the world tells us we should be.

TIMING UPDATE
Friday, January 26th at Noon EST

Thanks for voting y’all — we had a touch more votes for weekday afternoons over mornings, so I figure noon kind of splits the difference. I had planned for the week of the 29th, but decided to move it up to keep it in January — reach out if the change is a problem!

I’ll send the zoom link on Tuesday the 23rd.

Are you sure that’s what you want?

•••

I can’t believe they picked me.

I pull into the tiny parking lot behind the office and kill the engine, the last bars of Time to Pretend cut short as I grab the flimsy cotton tote holding my laptop and head for the front door.

The poured concrete floor confronts white walls at right angles, stretching up to the exposed ductwork 12 feet overhead. My flats announce my arrival with a soft echo. It’s always so quiet in here. I’d give anything if I could just scoot along the walls and get to my chair without calling attention to myself — each step to my desk feels like an invitation for someone much cooler than me to look up and realize I don’t belong.

The studio is in the newly hip Westside neighborhood of Atlanta. It’s small, with just a couple of rooms to house the nine or ten full-time employees and the two interns that cycle in and out each quarter. I started a few weeks ago, but I still have this tight, overstrung feeling in the center of my chest every time I come in. I can’t stop thinking I didn’t earn my place here — that I wedged myself in like a dog that keeps coming around until you break down and give him something to eat.

I take my spot at the round table in the middle of the studio and get out my laptop (careful not to set it down too loudly). No one looks up.

I don’t have an assignment but I can’t decide if it’s worse to interrupt someone or continue to sit there with nothing to do. Several minutes of waiting outside the principal’s office pass before finally the Creative Director sits back from his Cintique and walks over.

He is Icelandic. I’d bet he’s the only Icelandic person in Atlanta outside of Hartsfield International, and it gives him an air of mystery that he really leans into. Tall and thin, dressed in black with an impassive expression — just being near him gives you the feeling that you’ve got toilet paper stuck to your shoe.

He has (I have come to understand) impeccable taste and a manner of directness that makes my Southern raising stand on end. There is no one I find more imposing. There is no one I want more to impress.

I take note of what music he likes, the coffee he drinks, and most of all, what he says is “good” when it comes to design. We all do — but me more than most. I’m convinced if I look hard enough, somewhere in him is a better version of me. 

Kristofer wasn’t the first person I tried on for size. I’ve been diligently swapping out parts since I realized being Southern was a liability. Age twelve and enamored with Clarissa Explains it All, I would practice Melissa Joan Hart’s accent in my bedroom for hours, hell-bent on curing myself of sounding like a bumpkin (or worse — a bigot.)

There’s no shame in it, especially when you’re young and trying to figure out where you fit. Being alive is a continuous process of taking in information and deciding what to do with it. The small stuff is easy — what food tastes good, which shows we like. But the bigger things — what it means to be successful, what it looks like to be happy, how much is enough — that stuff we tend to believe we can’t figure out for ourselves. Other people are more qualified to show us what what we should want, what sort of life to strive for. 

11 years after scrubbing the South off my tongue, Kristofer seemed like he could teach me what I should want. He’d made it in the field I had chosen as my own and he was revered by pretty much everyone in our little gang of artsy fartsy ITP kids as the Taste Maker in Chief.  

I began whittling away at myself — rejecting things I once found beautiful, rolling my eyes at things I once found endearing and speaking my mind without worrying so much about the impact of my words. I was inching closer to becoming A Good Designer — hardly noticing whether or not I liked who that was.

Looking back on it, more mature now and (thank god) more comfortable in my skin, I’m certain that my pantomime¹ was the last thing Kristofer wanted. Most people who genuinely know themselves aren’t interested in copycats — they’d rather you stick to your guns and defend the things you like, screw what anyone else thinks.

But how do you explain it? When you’re there, in the moment, diligently casting yourself into a life that looks better than your own? How do you say that you’d love to be yourself — you’re just not exactly sure who that is. 

This is my beef with resolutions — New Year’s or otherwise. Last week I saw a TikTok of Niel DeGrasse Tyson pointing out that January 1st is meaningless from an astronomical point of view — it’s just a random day we’ve chosen (in the dead of winter) to mark the start of the year. Picking such an unseasonal time to “turn over a new leaf” is enough evidence that we’re doing it wrong, and that’s before we get to all the promises we make to ourselves about how this year is going to be the best ever because we’re finally going to stop being such a lazy piece of trash.

I have spent many first weeks in January flipping through the Capitalist Catalogue of Happiness and picked all kinds of new lives — one where I Lean In, one where I find balance, one where I ask for a raise, one where I buy a house, one where I stop eating cheese. The benefits described are compelling! Once achieved, a fulfilling, low-stress life with better eyebrows and more free time will unfold at my feet. And yet the band plays on. The end of the year comes and no amount of willpower, self-recrimination or deprivation has fixed what’s broke — to hell with the resolution. 

“I'm extraordinarily, laughably bad at doing things I don't want to do.” My friend Yvonne is zooming with me from outside of a coffee shop somewhere in the Oakland hills. She’s between meetings for a kids’ candy-making workshop at a local library and engineering shenanigans for the zip-line park her husband is starting. 

“I'm Chinese-American, my parents were never in that mold.” She says, when I ask her how she’s managed to swim against the tide for so many years.

“In China, my dad got kicked out of 8 schools — at one point he was doing stunt riding in movies. My parents were also, always doing things like — starting a llama farm or starting to import diamonds. Despite all that, they were way more financially successful than everyone around them. I never felt the need to follow the rules.”

In the years I’ve known her, Yvonne has designed her own award-winning STEM toys, published (at least?) two children’s books, built a successful independent design consultancy and a 45-thousand-person following on Instagram for her kids’ food project Eat Your Monsters. She is my friend who Got Out, and I have called her from almost every toxic job I’ve ever had and asked for a map. 

We meet for coffee and I explain how awful things are, how miserable I feel. She listens intently, and then with genuine confusion, asks me why, if I hate it so much, don’t I just quit?

I explain there are bills to be paid, futures to be tended, doors to be left open “just in case.” I don’t have words for the no-net feeling of relying on my own instincts — the suspicion that without the structure of the career-ladder world, I’ll deflate like one of those wacky-waving-tube-men in front of the car wash. Most of all I can’t tell her I have no idea what I want to do instead. Other than jam a brick in the anxiety-achievement merry-go-round. 

Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar calls this carnival ride of disappointment the Arrival Fallacy. That hopeless feeling when you’ve done everything right and collected all the prizes, but the high floats away faster than a fart in the wind, leaving a little hole where you’re sure you left your sense of purpose. Mix that in with our notorious inability to correctly predict what will make us happy and your average run-of-the-mill resolution is a recipe for always feeling one banana short of a bunch.

Yvonne couldn’t wait around, making herself miserable every day in hopes that one day all that stuff she can’t stand would magically change and make her life amazing. In her words, it’s because she sucks at anything she thinks is dumb. In mine, it’s because she is exceptionally good at listening to her gut.

Her process is simple, it just takes practice. 

Build a habit of asking yourself from moment to moment, “How does this feel? Am I having fun? Is it still interesting? Am I learning something cool? Do I want to keep doing this? 

If the answer is yes, by all means, go hard. If it’s no? No judgment — time to stop.

For me, I still have to really poke around in my feelings to get a sense for why something seems good. I’ve done so much time making everyone else happy that my gauge for what I want is a little busted. I have a hard time telling which desires originate in me and which ones have been incepted 👀

A woo-woo thing I’ve noticed is how the two feelings show up in different places in my body. Desires that are truly mine are wide and warm — a gentle fire drawing me forward from the center of my chest. The ones that aren’t mine have a pinching quality — they sit just over my shoulders and feel a little like being watched.

So this year, instead of asking everyone else what I should do more of, I am asking myself. I am sifting through last year looking for these sensations and making space to learn from them and ask for directions. 

I hope you’ll sit with me for a while — I think we’ll recognize ourselves if we’re patient.

1. It’s worth saying that I will always be grateful for what I learned in that studio — it was formative for me as a craftsperson and it opened me up to ideas that I couldn’t have come by anywhere else.