This time last year, I was in the throes of XOXO and a personal storm. I felt adrift and unable to move forward. I had gone to this wonderful festival, met wonderful and inspiring people, and made wonderful memories with dear companions. In the shadow of that event, I felt more lost and unable to find myself than ever, adrift on a still sea in a deep fog. I had hoped XOXO would provide a light through the haze; instead it grew thicker.

It has been a year since then and I find myself today on another flight to Portland, heading to another XOXO. Leading up to today, I have been thinking a lot about that fog, about how I’ve been moving through it, and how I’m still navigating a time in which I can’t see where I’m going.

The most stark difference between then and now is that I’ve changed fields, transitioning from a design role to a project management role.

I attribute a good part of the fog to my career as a designer. I had been floundering for years in design, doing a thing I was good at but for which I didn’t particularly care. The day-to-day was like a bar of gold, valuably providing for me and making it nearly impossible to keep my head above water. Design is what I went to school for, what I’d been doing for the last eight years, what I had assumed I would do for the rest of my years to come. That thought stunted me.

At the same time, I had been intermittently involved with community organizing to one degree or another for roughly the entire time I’d been working. My free time was largely dedicated to making spaces for others to gather, create, and collaborate. This work filled me up and was the main reason I managed to last as long as I did in a field that took so much out of me. Even when I was floundering or exhausted or depressed, I still organized.

The truism is to do what you love, and my hobby of organizing had seeped its way into most of my daily practices at work. It eventually became clear that I would be a much more productive and valuable asset as a project manager than as a designer. I made the official transition in November of 2018 and the fog began to thin.

Project management is hard. I’m regularly working more hours a week than I ever did as a designer. But what is obvious to me is that I care so much more than I did before. I’m invested in ways that I just couldn’t manage when I was pushing pixels. This change gave me work that I wanted to do, not just work I was good at.

In the months between that transition and now, I’ve seen more calm and contentment come back into my life. I’ve seen myself naturally work toward better balance, healthier habits, and even the slightest sparking of personal creativity once more.

One of the hardest things about the depression I’d been drifting through for years was that creativity completely left me. I could barely motivate myself to do any of the things I had once loved, had once thrived on. I didn’t draw or write, couldn’t draw or write, hated everything I made when I would force myself to draw or write.

I felt like a fraud. Calling myself a creative, organizing spaces for creatives, going to festivals for creatives; it all felt like I didn’t deserve any of it because I couldn’t make anything. I felt like I was taking up space in places when people far more deserving should have had my seat because I was an impostor.

I wish I could say I don’t feel that way anymore, but I can’t. I still feel adrift in so many ways. By aligning my day-to-day work with my skills and purpose, I feel I’ve moved further from day-to-day creativity. And so I continue to feel like I can’t claim creativity in my life.

But that distance has paradoxically allowed room for small sparks of creativity to come back. I’ve started writing poetry again. I occasionally draw something. I’m writing a tabletop game. Through the fog and depression, I am finding these stars that are piecing together a picture of where I am, where I might go.

I don’t know where that is or even if I’ll ever get somewhere that doesn’t feel like aimless drifting, but I want to believe that there’s a way though this. I want to see a clear dawn and I want to believe I am the things I want to be. If I’m navigating by these few stars, at least I’m moving. I have to keep moving.