CHAPTER ONE: Getting My Pink Back*, an introduction
This is me being vulnerable on the internet.
I became a mother during an early-morning thunderstorm after roughly two days of labor and a full work week. Chaos and creation: an unintentional through-line from my career into new motherhood.
My copper-haired, two-year-old hellion, nicknamed “Full Throttle”, is absolutely the love of my life but becoming her mother meant unraveling and reassembling myself. I’m still figuring out who I want to be in my mom era.
*Research has shown that it takes roughly two years or more after childbirth for the gestational rewiring of the brain to go back to “normal”, similar to flamingos who gain and lose the rich, beautiful pigment from their feathers as a physical manifestation of the food and energy it takes to raise their flaminglets. (src: NYT) Please be kind.
When I graduated from art school in 2011, my business card boldly declared: “Designer Extraordinaire & Future Ruler of the World.” I had bright pink hair and a BFA, and somewhere between working for and adjacent to corporate conglomerates, that title shrank down to just “designer.” And for a while, that was enough. In under a decade, I launched:
a jewelry line using recycled metals,
a bespoke wedding invitation business,
and a print-on-demand line at a major fashion retailer—
all balancing art commissions and while clocking in at corporate jobs from 9–6p in fashion and entertainment. Yes, it sounds incredibly impressive when listed out like bullet points on a résumé, but what it produced wasn’t success. It was burnout. And very chaotic.
Despite what the late-2010s girlboss era told us, the solution is not to work harder until you collapse, quit, heal, and then immediately sprint back into the same cycle. I’ve tried that. Zero stars. Do not recommend.
It took many years of reflection to realize that at my core, I’m an artist. Not just a designer. Not just a Creative Director. Not just a girl trying to create magic in the world while simultaneously working a full-time job, having a family, and living life. But an artist.
Graphic design, painting, photography, sculpture, metal-smithing, gardening—my interests have never stayed in one lane. But after maternity leave, I found myself thinking differently about my career, the world we live in, and what it means to leave it better for my daughter’s generation, especially as a proudly biracial woman. It forced me to confront who I am creatively and how I can inspire others in a cultural moment filled with noise, ideologies, and aesthetic philosophies being shouted from every digital rooftop.
So… like any rational person trying to rebuild their identity, I’m starting a newsletter to document what it’s like to be a fly on the wall in my brain: open drawers, papers on the table, books categorized by color, et al.
“Indirectly Designed” will be a treasure trove of career anecdotes, underconsumption aspirations, motherhood epiphanies, DIY tutorials, and creative prompts, possibly a pivot or two as the process of creating this project unfolds and my peace returns.
Art and design is a personal compulsion, a burning passion, not a choice. While that is not the case for everybody and not a one-size-fits-all fulfilling path, I infuse those elements into every facet of my being, including my career and being a mother. Hopefully, in my quest to document my own story, it’ll inspire you to create something beautiful of your own because the process of life, whether you know it or not, is indirectly designed through trial and error, editing, revising, and experimenting.