Embracing Discomfort and Building Meaningful Design Relationships
When I turned 25, I promised myself that I would view my life through the lens of seasons. Growing up, I was always exceptionally hard on myself, so much so that my parents often didn’t need to discipline me because my spiraling would do incomparable damage. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that a lot of the discomfort couples with lessons. All of those earth-shattering mistakes I made were more of a nudge in the right direction, a door closed to a space I know better than to return to.
Currently, I’m in a season of exploration and (incredibly uncomfortable) research. I fondly call this my R&D season. Uprooting your life comes with a devastating amount of uncertainty, and requires you to lean into what you know and where you feel like your pure self.
For me, I feel this when I’m designing and in a state of flow. It’s the whole process, from research to execution, that consumes me in the best way. I quite literally tune everyone out (a love letter to Apple’s Maxes) and allow myself to scroll infinitely, a nod to my late nights as a teenager, building an endless digital diary on Tumblr.
Sonia came into my life at the peak of my flow. It was January 2020 and I was entering my career as a web designer and developer. My dear colleague, Melissa Aly of Melo Creative, connected us, and in the intro email I described myself as up-and-coming. I was on my way out of a career in retail and had spent months teaching myself how to code and make websites. Sonia’s agency, Round Twelve, saw my potential and agreed to give me the keys to redesign their website.
Sonia and I have come a long way since then and built many websites together. But more importantly, we’ve built a beautiful relationship that teeters between professional and personal. I was there when she met her husband, when she had her first child, when she became an absolute force on TikTok. It’s a privilege to watch her thrive and to cheer on the ultimate internet cheerleader.
It feels more obvious that a large design community would be fulfilling, but there’s something about the individual connections that come from collaboration and creative admiration for creative that can fill our cups just as full. I owe this relationship to stepping outside of my comfort zone.. When I started designing, I relied a lot on what others had done. I taught myself to code by stubbornly recreating other websites and pushing boundaries on Squarespace. I was determined to make work I was proud of and spent hundreds of hours trial and erroring until things started to stick.
People like Sonia admire a quality like this. Although, in the moment it doesn’t feel nice at all, each step is getting me closer to who and where I want to be. Each client request pushes me further, the result of determination and tenacity. Nothing is out of reach and the best clients recognize the effort it takes to get there.
Even in my most uncomfortable moments, I trust that the lessons and the relationships I’ve built make it all worthwhile. Every step is inching me closer to my goals.. Every night spent scrolling for inspiration is informing my next design decisions. And every person I meet offers the chance to learn, grow and, in the most special situations, create a beautiful friendship that transcends the world realm.
The community built around aspirations, around discomfort, are some of the tightest. Empathy and its beauty recognize the steepness of the hill. A shared view is always the best.
