I was telling my friend tonight how Minus had asked me to write roughly about my expectations and overall journey post-design school. Which for me has been about three years? Four years? Hard to tell. Said friend has only known me since the end of last year, through our mutually frustrating job, so she hasn’t really seen the countless interviews I went on in blazing hot hot heat, or the millions of dollars I have in student loans that I’m still not paying off, or even the gallons of tears I’ve cried over my self doubt and self worth. All she knows is a bright-eyed, happy hour loving girl, that lives in Brooklyn, is making her way through the woman’s American dream via New York City. I tried to explain to her all of my unrealistic expectations I had out of school, and (shout out to my therapist) how now those have become passing thoughts instead of life markers I have to hit. Older, wiser, beautifully successful friend said she never really had expectations of her life, but more assumptions. Assumptions of what her life would be by a certain age—where she would be living, who she would spend her time with, how she would support herself. But she was never really bound to those in any way, and most all of them never happened like that anyway. She also raised a good point about how things she assumed she would never do, she is doing and succeeding at, which is more of an achievement in its own right than checking off that laundry list of things I must do by 30 or I will be a complete failure to my heritage.

I started to think about things I assumed I would never be doing now. Loving living in Brooklyn, cooking full meals on Sundays, paying $50 for champagne, being asked to work for a company where I felt honored to eat in their cafeteria, feeling completely content walking around by myself with no iPod, no agenda, no map.

When I first moved to New York out of school, it was hard. And it got harder. I put a mental cap on the amount of time and money I would spend here. After all, if I was to move back South and be married with a child, dog and mortgage by 33, you need to factor these things in. The design industry burned me more than once. I didn’t fit into the egos and poor fashion choices of the tops. After crying multiple times on the subway and spending numerous mindless hours on the elliptical, I realized I wasn’t The Graphic Designer I assumed somehow I would turn into after swimming upstream for a couple years in the job force. And I didn’t really mind it all that much. I care more about drinking wine on rooftops, crafting my best friend’s wedding invitations and writing blogs about the freaky deli counter man. I care more about living my life. I’m happiest when I’m on a bike with back brakes, not when I’m behind a computer screen pushing mechanicals around.

This is not to say I will be retiring early or quitting design for a life of leisure and a career in Brooklyn artist chic bar-tending. But it did help me realize that there are shops and people that want you for who you are, and not just how fast you can apply a Photoshop filter. And once I realized my assumption of what a hard-working-graphic-designing-woman-in-New-York, was nowhere close to the hard-working graphic-designing-woman-living-in-New-York that I was, everything fell into place. I am able to capitalize on my strengths as a person/artist/designer/employee/lover of the free world instead of chasing after a title that never fit me in the first place.

And once you figure that out, my friends, is when you can start appreciating who you are instead of who you assumed you’d be. Everything else usually follows suite.

Alison Matheny, Designer and Artist and Blogger and Uphill Biker, New York

Alison’s Blog
Alison’s Work

If you would like to submit your own personal experience to Chucked, email it over to: sarah@minus-five.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Chucked, Design.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


Previous Entries