Creative design but like, for your life 🎨

Hi, friend.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want my life to look and feel.

The thing about getting laid off is that all of a sudden, all I have ahead of me is a question mark—a big open expanse of what if. And for a type-A hyper-planner like me, that’s, uh, terrifying.

Had this happened even just a couple years ago, I would be throwing myself back into the job search, immediately seeking the stability and certainty (lol!) of a full-time job (LOL!).

But my brain is working differently these days, and combined with the dumpster fire that is tech, my own shifting feelings towards corporate in general, and my continued journey through post-cancer life (we don’t have time to unpack all of that), I’m feeling something new: this scariness smells like opportunity.

And so I’m trying to figure out what to, like, do with said opportunity.

A few months ago, I saw a post on LinkedIn from a marketing human I admire named Mallory Contois. In her post, she suggested setting lifestyle goals instead of title, company, and/or pay goals. My genuine reaction was 🤯.

Because DUH. Of course this is the way to build a life you don’t hate, and it’s crazy it hadn’t occurred to me to think about it this way before. Because when your lifestyle goals (which to me also encompasses your values, your daydreams, your hopes for the future, etc) don’t align with your actual job, things are gonna suck. And that’s the position I was finding myself in: everything I wanted/valued/loved was outside of my job.

But to live a lifestyle more in line with my goals, I needed to get clear on what those goals are. I’d been in so deep at work for, oh, a mere decade, that I’d lost sight of what my options were.

So obviously, I needed to start with Pinterest.

See, I’m a big aesthetics person. And my Pinterest is both my pride and joy, and the most consistent visualization tool I have. I’ve had it for approximately one million years, and it’s a pretty accurate capture of the ✨vibes✨ catching my attention at any given moment. I figured that it was as good a place as any to start getting clear on my lifestyle goals.

I went through my boards, and printed out every photo that poked at something in my brain. And then I got out my craft supplies and glued all that shit into my journal. It took up three pages.

Some of the photos are of outfits I like. Food I want to eat. Trips I want to take. One is literally just a picture of a toad. But put together, they start to evoke something that looks pretty different from my current day-to-day.

I then stream-of-consciousnessed a list of themes and ideas that came to me as I looked at this collection: everything from “cool hats” to “making money through creative enterprises supporting businesses I give a fuck about” (oop!). And from there, I’ve been able to start plotting out my new non-negotiables:

• I need a lifestyle that gives me control over my day-to-day schedule, so I can work with my brain and body’s needs and don’t end up sitting in 25+ hours of meetings every week
• Getting out into nature is the basis of my mental health and creativity, and needs to be prioritized
• I get jazzed by the idea of working with companies whose values align with my own and who are doing cool shit
• I never, ever, ever want to be forced to wear business clothes
• My creative pursuits, like photography, are really important to me, and I need to make sure I have time to play with them
• I have fun sharing stuff online and want to get serious about building an actual personal brand for myself around the things I feel passionate about (hi)

These bullets don’t add up to a job. But they do make it really clear the kinds of lifestyles that align with my goals, and the ones that don’t. Put simply, they help me clearly see what is “me” and what isn’t—what’s worth putting time into, and what’s not.

For someone like me, who has been desperately trying to fit into the corporate mold since starting my career, this was liberating: here is the real me, and here is what I’m comfortable demanding in the next stage of my life.

I don’t know exactly what my next job(s) will be—sometimes you just gotta throw yourself into the uncertainty and (to steal a corporate phrase that I hope to jettison from my brain right after I write this) build the plane while flying it. But I think it’s safe to say that it won’t be something conventional. And I’m pretty stoked about that. 🤙