I wrote this essay as part of Write of Passage, a cohort-based course for online writers I took part in October 2023. I published 4 essays over 5 weeks and learned a ton on the writing craft.
Yes, this road runs right through failure; yes, your heart will sometimes break—but you’ll be your own worst jailer if you chase a prize that’s fake.
Ellen Fishbein, Spacefaring: A Contribution to Earth’s Archives
You can’t change who you are.
Let me be even more specific. You can’t change your interests, curiosities, and fascinations. You can try your damn hardest to suppress them. But they’re always going to be there, lurking in the shadows, begging to be expressed.
The forces that determine what we’re drawn to exist in a realm beyond human comprehension. To deny them is an exercise in futility, but I understand why you may have felt compelled to do that throughout your life. It’s not your fault.
As adults, we are all victims of the invisible scripts that run our lives. These scripts are shaped by our parents, teachers, peers, and the list goes on. Wherever they come from, their strategy is the same: Use fear, criticism, and other intimidation tactics to convince you to give up on your dreams, abandon your sense of individuality, and lose your creative spirit. They lead us to take jobs we hate, stay in relationships that no longer serve us, and consume instead of creating things.
There is a grave cost to bear if you succumb to these scripts:
The gradual decaying of your soul, and the ensuing loss of your sense of wonderment in life, as you abandon and exile your inner child into the abyss.
Wouldn’t it be a shame if that were the story of your life?
The good news is this: even an exiled inner child can still be heard. Yes, their cries for attention might sound like whispers at first, but if you train yourself to listen closely, they’ll eventually mature into confident declarations of their existence.
How? Simple. Surrender to your nature.
Accept the things that make your eyes light up when you talk about them, or make you feel like time doesn’t exist when you’re immersed in them. They are gifts to be cherished and nurtured!
If you don’t have a sense of what these things are, that’s okay. You’ll just need to experiment a bit. That means playing like a child would, and exploring your curiosity, without any of the adults in your psyche interfering in the process. Create without a care for the outcome; play for play’s sake. Just write, draw, design, compose, capture, record, produce - whatever you feel compelled to do.
I’m on this exact journey, right now. I quit my tech job at a high-growth startup last year because I was on a one-way ticket to burnout city. It was long overdue. I had been pursuing a career in tech for the last decade that looked good on paper, mostly so I could impress my Father.
It sounds silly when I say it out loud, but it’s the truth.
Growing up, I considered my Father the ultimate model of a successful man. He had fiery ambition, a powerful entrepreneurial spirit, and a ruthless approach to doing business that helped him build what he would proudly proclaim as his “personal empire”.
As a teen, my obsession with design grew, but my dreams of pursuing it in a meaningful way were met with either criticism or indifference. Over time, I learned to let go of those dreams. But by denying my identity as a designer, I had allowed my Father’s critical, disapproving voice to become my invisible script. I’ve worked really hard since then to undo the powerful grasp it’s had on my life.
It’s taken a lot of inner work for me to arrive at these conclusions, and I’m in the middle of a radical experiment to seriously venture into the design world (while dragging my kicking and screaming scripts along with me, of course).
In this new world, I feel like a child: starry-eyed at the endless possibilities that await me as I continue to develop my craft, but also overwhelmed at the vast, murky terrain that lies ahead.
When I sit in front of my computer to do anything design-related, I have about a 5-second head start before I’m ambushed by an army of scripts trying to pry my fingers away from my keyboard. And they’re willing to die for their cause!
Luckily, I’ve discovered an effective defense against their onslaught: a delicious Americano (gotta love that dopamine kick), and a pair of Bose noise-canceling headphones to blast progressive metal into my ears as a distraction.
All this to say: I have no idea what these revelations around design mean for my career, but that doesn’t matter. For now, my goal is to keep designing. The journey ahead looks like it’ll be as challenging as it may feel fulfilling, but at the end of the day: I am a designer. I’m surrendering to my nature. If you can relate to my story, I hope you find the courage to surrender to yours too.