Since my mother’s passing in March of 2022, I’ve been thinking a lot about turning points, new ideas, new paths, new directions, and moving forward with my life. After the last ten years as a caregiver, I have the opportunity to make a course correction, and I’m taking advantage of it. Throughout my prior twenty plus year professional career in the NYC design industry I learned from both observation and experience that if you drift aimlessly and allow life to make your choices, you’ll end up somewhere you never desired. Now I find myself at a turning point, emerging from a decade of limited life choices, where I spent much of my time spiraling in a holding pattern, waiting on an inevitable but unpredictable resolution determined by events beyond my control.
Now, I haven’t drifted aimlessly over the past decade by any means. In addition to care giving, for six of those years I worked as a lighting designer, a specialization intimately integrated into the interior and architectural design industry. I am lucky to have worked with and learned from two master lighting designers during that time, and feel I have become reasonably accomplished at it myself. It was a creative outlet that paid my bills and preserved the majority of my sanity. Still, things needed to change. I won’t fall back on my earlier career, at least not completely. I realized early on that my lifelong goal to be an architect was naively misguided. I wanted to be an architect, but in the vein of the great romantic 19th and early 20th century master artists/architects, not in the more profit driven, technological, legal and business based model of the 21st century. The “Architect” with a capital “A” that I dreamed of becoming sadly no longer exists. I also realized I would only stagnate as a lighting designer. My old ideas served me well, but have become impractical, or worse yet, a comfortable circular complacent rut. It’s time for some new ideas to kick me out of my rut and give me some new and interesting challenges.
I’d love to say I just sat down while a clear path to the future miraculously revealed itself in a flash of inspiration, but that would be untrue. Instead, my self-doubt, anxiety and depression – reawakened from early adulthood, prompted me to seek out a professional counselor. A good counselor doesn’t tell you the answer to your problems, but helps you discover the answers for yourself. Through my discussions and work with her, along with a great deal of healthy introspection, letting go, and journaling, I was able to find my new path.
I won’t go into great detail here, other than to say this new path is filled with opportunities for exploration through learning and creative expression. I’d like to share that exploration if you are interested. Will it showcase writing? Yes. Will it offer food information and recipes? Certainly. Will it cover my old love of interior design, architecture and landscape? I’m sure. Will it be a gallery for my original designs, photography and artwork? Probably.
Will it be any good? I certainly hope so!
The concept is a social media based platform ( of course) Using YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Blogging to offer access points and present diverse ideas. Eventually I will link everything to a web page with what I plan to be an online store with original and carefully curated merchandise.
It is a path I’m building as I go, looking for new challenges and heading in a new, fresh direction.