I was living back in my hometown after spending a pretty random year living with a friend in Cardiff, and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. It was difficult to figure out what I did want to do, so I thought I’d start by figuring out what I didn’t want to do.
If I thought of something that mildly interested me, I’d just try it. This led me to all sorts of strange places, like trying to make the perfect leather belt, pitching “imaginary friends” to a large U.K. charity, having a trial day as a dental technician, and pitching articles to newspapers.
I’ll write about those some day, suffice to say that I was casting a wide net. Next, I started drawing, and then I drew some more, and suddenly I had stacks of sketchbooks. I emailed a university professor and asked if I could study art. After a cup of tea on campus, they said yes.
For the first year, I studied both art and design. I did reportage drawing in the rafters of a cathedral. I made expressive sketches of the naked form in charcoal. I etched, screen printed, painted and more. It was wonderful. It filled me up and gave me a new community.
At the same time, I started to tinker with computers again. I’d always loved computers—they created a world to which I could escape when I needed to. They let me learn things, make things, and meet people. I started to wonder if I should be making things on the computer.
From my second year at university, I started majoring in design, with art taking more of a back seat. I started making things on the computer, but it wasn’t fulfilling me in the ways that I’d hoped. I was making things on the computer, but I wasn’t making things for the computer.
If I was to make things destined for the physical world, I wanted to make them with physical media. I could do that in art class, so more and more I made things for the computer (by which I mean: software). If the computer was the tool, software was the medium.
I quickly realized that the medium wasn’t a picture of software though, it was the software itself. That could mean many things, but for me it at least meant “code”. I started to teach myself programming using books from the library, and turned every assignment into software.
That stuck, and in the years since I’ve helped to design and build lots of software. If you’d asked me what I wanted to at the beginning, I don’t think that “designing and building software” would have rolled off the tongue. I had no real archetypes demonstrating that it was possible.
So often, the things that resonate with us are a complete mystery. You can think long and hard about it, but it’s really difficult to think about whether you might enjoy something that you can’t yet fully imagine—let alone something you haven’t actually experienced.
Sometimes, you just have to start. You simply have to start doing, start making. You have to make something, anything, and it might lead to the next thing, and the next. We try so hard to think about the actions that we should take, but sometimes we should simply act.
I say this as I sit here, quite content making software, but suddenly wanting to make more art. I started writing here every day for that exact reason: to begin exploring my art. I’m writing about something, anything and seeing where it leads. Maybe more writing, maybe much more.
Life isn’t linear. The pace doesn’t have to stay the same. You don’t have to do only one thing. You can do many things. The one thing that’s still true for me though: you just have to start.