Twinkle Twinkle

It's been a raucous weekend on this street, with a steady stream of crackling startling pop pop pops and dragon-dance-style drumming from my neighbor's Chinese New Year celebrations. As my neighbors chase away their evil spirits I find myself facing my old nemesis, the Spectre of Overachievement.

I've recently come into contact again with Young People. You know, those people you were not so long ago. Ok, the person I was anyway. I was recalled to my alma mater to speak to the young'uns on a Career Development Panel, the first in my school's history to include Careers in Design. It was flattering and mortifying at the same time.

Not only do I not really know where to go with my career at the moment, but my other panelists were major major achievers. Started her own firm. Designs for Pottery Barn. Made it big when her website went public. Saves the world with ingenius product improvements and inventions from the mouse to the Swiffer (and also, a big cheese at Famous Sexy Design Firm I'd been coveting some posts back, and who turned out to not be hiring). And then me, the "Intermediate Designer" at Big South Bay Firm.

At the networking lunch, the students eagerly pawed my brain with questions, and I did my best to be honest- it's a tough profession, you're not in it for the money, yes it's an awesome feeling when it's done and the client loves it, the frustrations of clients who think 80's Trapper Keeper graphics are the coolest and best designs ever, and so on. I had forgotten that feeling of being at the beginning, optimistic, excited, eager, spilling enthusiasm from your eyeballs. I loved their energy. I envied it. I wondered if I had mine anymore and where it'd gone. It comes and goes, but it isn't always there lately. Many would argue, I'm still at the beginning, and I don't doubt they are right. It's just knowing where to go that's the trick. After a break came the panel...the part I dreaded, sitting behind a front table in a crowded conference room. And it was worse than I imagined. Of the entire audience, maybe 40-50 people, only one was an aspiring architect. One. The rest were aspiring product designers. So every time myself and the woman with her own firm spoke about our profession - the 10 licensing exams, the apprenticeship, the pay....the students would look at us grimly, a slight shake of the head, as if to say 'Why? How?'

We were asked to stay afterwards to answer questions, and everyone was promptly mobbed by the eager students, many of whom were actually the same age or older than me (grad students?). Except me. I stood there, dumbly, with nobody to ask me questions, pretending to be unusually thirsty with my only prop, the water bottle, but trapped by the other panelists from escape. And the door was so. close. One girl, a mechanical engineer, sympathetically pretended to ask me about ME firms in NYC she could apply to. Eventually two of the panelists were sufficiently cornered so that I managed to slip past...neglecting to make my schmoozy networking move on the famous design company guy-whom I had intended to corner myself to try to get him to put my face to my resume. Bruised Ego hustled me out instead.

I plodded across the still-rain dampened lawn to my car, the same one I had when I was a student, marveling at how different it was to return to this campus I loved so much, where I'd felt so lucky and alive and trying to figure out how to recapture that fire. The campus always seemed to be the same: freshly rained, renewed potential, eternally sunny. Where did that spark go? I was as much the student at the Panel as the ones I was allegedly advising, thinking back to the recurring comments of the other panelists:

You have to be persistent. Be persistent.

And so once again I soldier on, making it my Chinese New Year resolution to be persistent - except only now it's not the checklist-type goals I must focus on. I have to find that spark again. And again. and again.