Splash Warning: This blog post is a series of tedious thoughts and arbitrary anecdotes that have transcended time and space to be knitted together and presented for you as a delectable platter of pick and mix masquerading as amuse-bouche. I thought that turning them into a blog post was a reasonable justification for putting off updating my CV. Enjoy.
So, you’ve just reached the bottom of your second box of Lindt and you’re either asking yourself what day it is between Christmas and New Year or, like myself, what day of your oblivion isolation you’re on. Either way we’re all wondering what we should be doing now as we contemplate the annual conundrum of whether a new year really means a new you.
I started this post a long time ago and it never came to fruition. But I’m ready to take another run up at starting the rest of my professional life, and the next 5 days of isolation seem to be a better time than ever to feel inspired and finish this post. I’m trying to update/start my CV to demonstrate that I haven’t left all my design knowledge on the other side of the pandemic. In doing so I find myself asking the same questions of how to present myself as a designer and if I’m worthy of doing so.
As designers we design the world around us, but arguably the most daunting thing we design of all is ourselves. In a perfect world we wouldn’t have to worry about how we present ourselves, but the reality is there is pressure to paint ourselves to be employable, likable, relatable... How true are any of these versions of us? The layers of authenticity quickly fall away when we start comparing ourselves to the curated and filtered versions that we post in our zeitgeist of ‘gram. We run the risk of trying to be and do too many things. This often leads to us feeling unworthy of calling ourselves these things when the mirror falls short of the filter. This is certainly a feeling I struggle with, feeling that I should be doing a million things, and no amount of mental or physical gymnastics is enough to get me there.
Similarly, there is a pressure to be perfect at our hobbies or interests. To feel we are worthy of saying that we can do or enjoy something often feels like we need to be the best at it but that simply isn’t true nor is it a fair expectation to put on yourself. Not every kid that said they wanted to be a footballer when they were young grows up to be Farah Williams or Harry Kane, but football remains a popular hobby for many whether playing in a local league or simply tuning in to watch the matches. Just because you aren’t the best doesn’t make you worthy of any less.
From its title you might thing that Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck would be full of half-hearted cliches that don’t really amount to much. Though probably not the “reliable source” our English teachers hoped for, I was struck by the simplicity and poignancy of much of Manson’s teachings. He suggests that much of self-help content ‘is actually fixating on what you lack’ and in aspiring to make more money or telling yourself you need to be beautiful you are creating a space in which what you are now isn’t enough. Ironically, the longer you spend with a ‘fixation on the positive’, telling yourself that you need to be something that you aren’t currently, the more we reinforce our shortcomings and the less satisfied we become with our own lives. He goes on to say that in our pursuit of the superior we become ‘overly attached to the superficial and fake’ only to end up dedicating life to ‘chasing a mirage of happiness’. As you might have guessed from his title, Manson believes that ‘giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health’, a fact that we all know too well as children of the 21st century. As true as this is out of the professional world, I found this sense of imposter syndrome in much of my university life. I was comparing my work to others in the studio and thinking “theirs is so much better than mine!”. I was also comparing HOW I work to others - your “PROCESS” as it were. My own process was something that took me a while to even realise and only now am beginning to become okay with.
Initially I began this blog post in the 2020/21 academic year after Christine Kingsley, futuristic communicator and calmer of my frazzled nerves extraordinaire, had asked me to come and talk to the year below about my dissertation topic and the Communication Futures module Christine taught us. We discussed how often we were told to “trust the process”. Although this is a mantra of staying calm and don’t worry about it, this actually fuelled my anxiety further (not hard these days) as I asked myself what is my process and why should I trust it?
Having studied for around 20 years you would have thought one might know what one’s creative process was. But no. I hadn’t a clue. I didn’t have a stunning sketchbook or magnificent models. I was angry with myself. How had I gotten this far without understanding how I worked. I didn’t feel like I deserved to be working alongside my talented colleagues with beautiful processes that they had worked hard to craft.
One day I was having one of my regularly scheduled breakdowns in Christine’s office and she told me that I was a collager. She went on to say that I gathered lots of bits of information in my head until I start to see the whole idea. Each bit of research was a little clue to the bigger picture. A bit like in the ITV show Catchphrase where the contestants have to guess the bonus catchphrase and reveal a little part of the bigger clue with each right answer. To me this justified my manic tendencies to flit between things, people, books and discussions. I was researching. These were my clues. The validation this gave me was such a relief. But did I really need the validation? At the time probably. But I wouldn’t have, had I given less of a fuck about comparing myself to what other people were doing. The same was true of my final project which I completed the final three months of during lockdown in the living room of our 2 bedroom flat, much to my flat mate’s delight. Though being kicked out of the studio was the saddest day of university, I was able to focus on my own work and escape the inevitable comparisons I would have been making to other people’s work had I been in the studio. For that I am grateful, and I know my project might not have become what it did had things panned out differently. Although collaboration is a big part of the creative process, at the time I needed to allow myself the space to focus and lockdown provided that to me in ample amounts. It brought refreshing clarity to what I was doing and allowed me to connect with my project more personally and design something I was proud of and actually liked in the end. Whether other people liked it or not is a different story, but the point was I didn’t care because I did.
As I chatted to the year below, I described design as carving a statue. When I think back to the final months before completing my degree, I was asking myself “What is it?”, “What does it do?”, “How does it look?”, as if the answers existed in a secret place that I was trying to find. The truth is there is no map to this secret place, and ‘x’ doesn’t mark the spot. But for me product design has been like chiselling away at a sculpture. You start with just a block, a lump of stone, an unidentifiable shape that could yet be everything or nothing. Bit by bit you chip away to reveal a new layer, a detail, which gives you a clue as to which bit you should knock off next. The more you chip away you get closer to understanding what it is you are designing. Then all of a sudden it reveals itself to you, clear as day, the obvious piece of the puzzle you had been missing which pulls the design together. Then you can go in and refine the details and craft the final design, because now you know what it is, and begin to see the final product that you didn’t know existed when you began. The true heart of this process is having the courage to keep asking the questions even when you don’t have a clue what you are doing or what “it” is. Sometimes you put the chisel down and just “smash it with a hammer” (points if you get the reference), but you keep going and all of a sudden, bish bash bosh, you’re blooming Michelangelo.
As I conclude this episode of Lorena’s brain farts, a famous quote comes to mind:
“a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”
Whether you’re a saucy sketcher, a prototyping princess, a raring researcher, or something completely different, I want to remind you and myself that it is okay to be all of these things or none of them at all. As I write this, I’m also trying to update my CV and website. I have multiple word documents open and too many tabs, collaging my thoughts as they come to me. Some are more applicable to other things but that’s the process. A mess. Classic me. But I’m beginning to be okay with that. It’s okay to have goals and aspirations, but it is important to separate the aspirations from what your expectations are for yourself. Don’t apologise for your strengths, recognise them, but also don’t feel inferior if yours look different to other peoples. It’s all valid.
Currently I have several identities. I’m working in a café by day and by night I’m still working on my honours project 2.5 years later (a story for another blog post). The time in between that I’m in my dressing gown with greasy hair and copious amounts of chocolate trying to scrawl down the inner workings of my mind on a laptop. It isn’t what I planned but we stan. I’m just trying to become okay with my process and realise that I don’t need to be doing amazingly at everything all of the time for them all to be worthy of being acknowledged.
The best way to communicate with your future self it would seem, is to trust the process and give less of a fuck. In conclusion, be and do everything, or be and do one nothing. Just do you boo and don’t worry if it’s new or not. Be kind to yourself. Welcome 2022.