People like tidy labels. Designer. Musician. Strategist. Writer. One word. One lane. Something easy to file you under.
I've never fit comfortably inside one. And when someone asks what I do, I’m still tempted to say "designer by day, musician by night" — which sounds neat, but always feels slightly wrong the moment it’s out of my mouth. I’d love to just say I'm an artist. But people picture a painter. Creative director feels closer… and yet even that reduces something. Every label I try on fits in one place and pulls somewhere else.
For a long time, I treated that as a problem to solve. So I tried splitting things up. Design work under a studio name. Music under me. Separate accounts, separate bios, separate audiences — or were they the same audience? I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to work that out. Constantly wondering what I should be posting, how I should be describing myself, whether I was confusing people. It was exhausting. And the strange thing is, I wasn’t confused about who I was. I was confused about how to package it. The frame was wrong, not the picture.
When I actually looked at what I do — designing a brand, writing a song, putting words on a page like this — I kept finding the same movement underneath. Clarity. Translation. Expression. Taking something felt but formless, and giving it shape. The medium changes. The process doesn’t.
Once I stopped fragmenting myself across different containers and let everything live in one world, something shifted. Not just practically, though conversations did get easier, and new kinds of opportunities started to open up. Something deeper changed too. I was able to go further in how I express things, how I share work, how I understand myself… because nothing was in isolation anymore. Everything was allowed to inform everything else. The connections became visible. The throughline became clear.
You don't have to compress yourself into one label to be understood. The range isn't the problem. The missing thread is. Find that, and the rest of it — all the different things you make and do and are — starts to feel like one body of work rather than several half-finished ones.