losing myself

i'm having lunch with new people today. those first encounters with new people and friends remind me of a first date. you're not sure if your sarcasm really translated, you wonder if you have spinach in your front teeth, you hope that you don't come off as rude.

i usually worry that i ask too many questions and people's meals turn cold. i can't help but want to learn about new people. i'm fascinated. as i began to think about the questions i would ask, i then wondered what questions would i have to answer.

so on my drive home, i thought about why i love design. i sometimes say that i am a self-taught learner of design. when all i had was microsoft PAINT i would go to town....as a youngun. and then when i had a bootleg copy of photoshop, i couldn't help but twiddle around in it. there was probably a moment when i should have changed degrees and officially went into some type of media communications, but i decided that journalism seemed like a good fit. i'm nosy and i don't mind asking a lot of questions. i don't think that i am particularly good or profound writer, but i can write well enough. so on a many of projects, i would usually give enough attention to the writing, but i would prefer to figure out the design and layout of my piece.

this happened throughout my undergrad and grad studies probably to a fault. i doodled because i saw and heard designs. i closed my eyes when i listened to music because it seemed to come to life. i enjoyed visiting museums and gardens for the sake of being around beauty.

and one summer i noticed i began to lose myself...not in a good way. i was working two jobs (one retail and one PR) and gearing up for school. i didn't see where i was going to or how i was supposed to find more time to develop or nurture the creative part of me. i didn't seem like myself. i actually seemed more unfamiliar to myself than i've ever experienced before. and at the advice of a friend, i just began to fiddle around with designing again. i don't think that i came up with anything actually that good, but i lost myself in something that fed my soul.

i tried to figure out how to articulate why it feels good to design. i thought about it during this morning's pilates class, i thought about it as i ran inside my apartment (you never know who is lurking around this early in the morning) and i figured it out.

i claim to hate math, but there's something magically mathematical about design (other than the obvious things). you know how you feel when you finish a math problem, balance a budget, reconcile a statement...that sense of relief and release. that's how i feel when i design and finish something. it's an emotional yet logical sense of relief. a moment when reason and feelings rest in a color, word or photo. it doesn't get any better than that.

and when i don't...i feel like i'm in a perpetual place of tension.

i would compare it to a chick hatching (bri and marcia and i had a good conversation about chicks hatching). the chick can see the light, hear the noises and smell the life outside the shell...but it has to keep chipping away, little by little, to actually get out and fly. such freedom. something is always trying to break free, be told, be shared...and i want to sit with the story, the person, the color, the music, and let it free.

i love that i have that opportunity at word made flesh. i enjoy what my role means in advocacy. we're in the midst of a really busy redesign and i can tell that i'm losing myself a bit...in a bad way. and i think probably in a necessary way. and when i say losing myself i think i mean that i'm losing an important part of who i am because of circumstances beyond my control. it's the unhealthy sense of losing myself.

my right and left brain are competing for my attention in a weird game of musical chairs. when the music stops, i'm never sure what side will win. i really hate musical chairs :)

in the meantime, i'm trying to take more photos (i need to get some printed for display). i'm asking my design friends a lot of questions (i am desperate to learn - if you enjoy teaching someone all you know about design, let me know). i'm trying to practice good creative rhythms. hopefully this will be an inspiring season for me.

i think it's probably a good thing that i wrote my response to hypothetical questions here because someone could accuse me of talking too much.

:)