8.26.23

I don’t know that design pedagogy
gave us tools to process this.

After I unpack a big part of what it is that I’m trying to process through design story-telling, my advisor Silas says“ I don’t know that our design pedagogy gave us tools to process this." Which is super affirming, and I am extremely grateful for. It’s a statement that acknowledges a part of the human that has been woefully overlooked in design pedagogy. Our pedagogical structures are still heavily rooted in a way of teaching that is over 100 years old, and relies heavily on logic and research, and never on instinct and experience.

His feedback drops into my ADHD hamster wheel, fueling the mad-question-asking machine, and everything else in my life will now be competing for my attention as my brain chases the questions that come flying out. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is this graphic design? YES? How is this graphic design? If this is graphic design, can I create a pedagogical framework from my journey, while I am on it? If I make a framework, can I teach it? Should I teach it? Will this be good for me? Could it be good for other people? Would attempting to create a framework be a display of hubris?

I go back to my wants and match them up with my questions.

Q: What am I doing?
I am transforming a base material (life experience) into something of value (life lessons). I’m telling a story of personal alchemy using graphic design as my medium—again.

Q: Why am I doing it?
I want to understand what the story of my life is so far. I want to understand the way graphic design can be used to tell a personal story. I want to understand how personal projects can be harvested out of lived experience.

Q: What am I doing?
I am thinking about how the story we tell ourselves about our own lives, defines our reality. I’m figuring out how to tell a story where trauma is a catalyst for change and growth. I’m trying to honor the hurt and suffering that happens within that experience without hijacking the listener’s nervous system. I am definitely intellectualizing my feelings.

Q: Why am I doing it?
I hope to understand this process well enough to create a pedagogical framework that enables designers to do for themselves, what we are trained to do for our clients. I want to expand my practice beyond graphic design as a service/commodity.

Q: What am I doing?
I am learning how to write an autobiography using design storytelling. I am telling a personal story in my strongest voice—graphic design.

Q: Why am I doing it?
Because I’m an artist.

Q: What am I doing?
I am figuring out how to teach designers to be artists again.

That last answer is so obvious that I feel a little dumb. Like searching for your glasses when they are on your face kind of dumb. I also have this realization that there is a real-ass need to remind designers that they are artists. I needed to be reminded that I am an artist. When I think about how I got to this point, I remember the “Swiss cock!” and I laugh. This was a phrase I formed as a design student when pushing back against certain aesthetics or processes that were too rigid or logical. You can trace the very narrow path of what is often taught as the fundamentals of design back to the Bauhaus, and Swiss modernism—and while there is value in those histories—so much is cast aside in their favor. Much time is spent chasing the Swiss cock.

During that time I was becoming more interested in spiritual and instinctual approaches to design. I craved absurdity, poetry, “witchcraft,” and science fiction. I wanted to create in the realm of the sublime. I wanted to lean on an ancestry that was more connected to the spirit, and nature.

In returning to my role as a student, I am picking up where I left off. But I am not just a student this time, I am also a teacher. There are new and old dualities at work this time. I don’t just want to create graphic design in a radical way, I also want to learn how to teach in a radical way.

Q: Que quieres?
Quiero aprender curanderismo. Quiero se curado, y quiero aprender a ser curandera.

8.27.23

Stories are the opposite of secrets.

In a HuffPo piece written by Steve Romo, the author writes “Stories are the opposite of secrets,” and my brain releases a nice hit of dopamine.

I realize I’ve been trying to tell a secret when I need to be telling a story.

Stories have pacing. Loud. Quiet. Loud. It’s what made moving through Jessica’s story with so much grace possible. There is a cadence, a rhythm, and a composition. Stories are crafted, they carry lessons and reflections of humanity. Stories are created to share knowledge, they offer lessons designed to overcome and avoid suffering. Stories create community.

A secret is three sentences that live in your nervous system.

Secrets are highly potent distillations. They are truths boiled down to lethal concentrations that wreak havoc in even the smallest dose—lessons, empathy, and humanity are vaporized in the distillation process. Once it escapes, a secret becomes a thing that is quietly slipped from one person to another with the false expectation that it will never be shared, and with each sharing, the secret is a magic catalyst for judgment and conjecture.

The only thing more lethal than secrets are lies.

8.29.23

Internalized misogyny is a bitch.

 I only know that I will never again trust my life, my future, to the whims of men, in companies or out. Never again will their judgment have anything to do with what I think I can do.
—Toni Morrison

All of my human-inflicted trauma is intrinsically linked to the painful fact that I was born female, baptized in patriarchy, and pickled in a brine of misogyny whose ingredients included an acidic pressure to be flawless and useful as a means of proving myself worthy of choosing.

The Christian Church traffics patriarchy into the family and calls it “holy.” In church, I learned that my creator’s pronoun was HIM, and HE is also my FATHER. I was told, as a member of the church, that my role was to be an obedient BRIDE to his son. I was told that Woman/Eve was created for Man/Adam. All of this dogmatic teaching frames your existence as a woman—as an ancillary one. You are a being whose purpose is meant to behold the magnificence of His. You exist to affirm him, to witness him, to give him meaning.

Manipulation and gaslighting were also normalized in church teaching. I learned that the Father God is all-knowing and that I should commit all my trust and obedience to his knowing. I was assured that even when I experienced suffering and felt confused that GOD, always acted in my best interest. “KEEP TRUSTING HIM.” Was the advice given to all who were lost, confused, and hurting. “Lean NOT on your own understanding.”

Personally, I find believing in a benevolent and intelligent creator who is rooting for me, to be extremely comforting. I’m grateful to have been given a pathway to believing this part of the story of God. The part I find extremely problematic is the gendering of that creator, and attaching the qualities of God to the concept of a MAN. These very lofty ideas about an infallible benevolent GOD, and all the problematic ways humans should serve him are then transferred to actual human men. The relationship of father and child, and husband and wife especially.

That cut, copy, paste, version of trust and obedience was expected and delivered in my relationships with my dad, grandfather, and step-dads. Leaning not on my own understanding, I stepped into cars with drunk men, ignoring the gnawing in my belly that said “he’s gonna crash the car on the way home.” Because I was a child, and they were the FATHER. Buckle-up kiddo.

Despite receiving the anointing of third-wave feminism in the form of riot girl feminist literature, art, and music in my teens, I was not able to exercise every demon of patriarchy. Some of them had found their way into my body before I could even speak, and they showed up in my marriage. Jay and I had exchanged vows over ten years ago, and in that time he did a pretty great job showing up for me, demonstrating care, wisdom, and intelligence. The church would say he was “Godly” and my subconscious would interpret that as “infallible, and unwavering.” I trusted him beyond my own reasoning, the way I was trained up to.

There was a bad day, a secret was shared, and an old father wound deep inside my husband was ripped open, and he began to suffer intensely. As a partner, his suffering became my suffering. I knew this particular scenario well. I had experienced a similar trauma in my teen years, and it did a number on me. My bottom was getting arrested for shoplifting at 16 years old—it was teen-sized bottoming out. I worried about what his bottom would be if I couldn’t get him help before things got really bad. I was pregnant with our second child—the stakes were high.

He quickly returned to the well-worn pathways of avoidance he had forged in his own adolescent years. He was drinking a lot, constantly working, and leaving me alone with the lion’s share of responsibility for the lives we created together. I tried to ask for help, I tried to set boundaries, I advocated for therapy, suggested sobriety, and offered solutions to his/our problems—all my efforts failed. He refused help, lied to me about how he was going to start getting his shit together tomorrow, and weaponized my own family trauma and mental health challenges against me. Later, my therapist taught me that this is part of the pathology of emotional abuse, it even has an acronym “DARVO.” Deny, Avoid, Reverse Victim Order. Each time, the internalized misogyny of my childhood left me prioritizing his knowing, over my instincts. What started out as empathy became me enabling my own abuser. My husband could always breadcrumb me back to the romantic genesis of our relationship. We were soul mates, fated by the universe, and so in love that we could never cause each other harm.

This cycle of abuse worked so well because it was so familiar. It was a route well-worn through my grey matter. In relationships with men, my baseline was a 7-year-old girl who believed her father, was like God. All knowing, all loving, my best interest always at heart. Even when he stinks like alcohol and weed and you have fallen for the “you got something on your shirt” joke again.

09.02.23

Listening & Witnessing

I attended a Friday evening Snap-hosted “Council” for the first time, and found the experience to be a great lesson in witnessing. The Council’s structure provides guidelines for storytelling, and listening—and ultimately creates a space to be compassionate witnesses to another person’s life.

The session reminded me of the Imago therapy that Jay and I experienced with our marriage therapist. After participating in Council, I can understand how to apply what I learned in Imago therapy to relationships that lie beyond my immediate rings of intimacy.

I was diagnosed with ADHD later in life, and for most of my childhood what were actually symptoms were treated as personality defects and labeled “bad” behavior. Being reminded that I was failing to “fix” my bad behavior had a profoundly negative effect on my self-esteem. I was never taught how to listen, or why. I think learning to be a “good listener” instead of a “bad talker” would have helped wire the reward pathways in my brain better.

If I had participated in something like Council as a child, I think it would have helped me develop a strong listening reward system.

09.04.23

Don’t talk,
put your head on my shoulder.

It was my third year of design school, the economy was a disaster, and I was really anxious about building a sustainable life after the safety net of borrowing money from Sallie Mae was gone. I was working on the Manifesto Project, an assignment with a reputation for cracking you wide open as a designer. I understood that becoming something new is a process full of tension. I accepted that. But building muscle still hurts, even when it’s what you want, and have deemed “good” for you. I was cracking. Hard. The combination of anxiety, effort, and #goals had worn me thin, and I wasn’t choosing to rest the way I should have. Jay saw this, he saw me struggling and he came to my rescue.

He probably rubbed my arms and said something like, “C’mon boo, let’s get the fuck outta here.” in a tone sweet enough to convince me to actually step away from the studio and follow him wherever he was going. I trusted him, and so I went. We got in the car, got on the road, and I am sure we both lit up a cigarette. He would listen while I verbally tried to untangle the knots of the thinking process I was wrapped up in, and exhausted by. We would cross over the Santa Monica Mountains, slip back into the Valley, and pull into a parking spot in front of Amazing Thai. I would follow him inside, where we found seats at the bar top. He would order us each a drink, and our favorite dishes. “Here.” he handed me an earbud, and I put it in my ear, and he put the other in his ear….