Welcome to Artist Manufacturer
When I was six, I decided I wanted to be an Artist, and then I decided I didn't.
I found the evidence on an early visit home from California: the bright yellow cover of Dr. Seuss's MY Book about ME peeking out under soccer participation awards, a BMX birthday party trophy, and dance competition ribbons in an old box. I tucked the familiar activity book into my suitcase after snapping a few ironic trophy photos, and forgot about it until I unpacked in San Francisco.
I was delighted to find that I had dutifully and authoritatively documented the most important details about my world as a six-year-old: how many steps it took me to get to the first tree in our front yard, favorite colors, preferred animals. The scrawled-in answers to Seuss and Roy McKie’s fill-in-the-blanks questions read as a classic ode to childhood. Reading it in my early twenties, I loved visiting the enthusiasm and confidence of an only child recently turned eldest, and seeing my beginnings as a personality-test-loving millennial.
A two-page section to choose a future dream job was the only place I found any self-doubt. To assist with the question—crucial for the formation of a child under capitalism—Seuss included a long list of possible answers, alongside a field to write in what you wanted to be. Looking back as a young professional, fifteen years later, I was ready to be charmed. Firefighter? Astronaut? Surely the answer would be childish, and the why obvious.
Instead, I found Manufacturer written in my lumpy child’s hand. Still visible beneath it was my erased first answer, Artist, carefully penciled over. What child in the 1990s declares their intent to become a Manufacturer over an Artist? Who defined Manufacturer for me, and what did they say that was so compelling? Why not an Astronaut? Did I sense my future high school wouldn't offer physics?
Reading it as a new designer at Apple, in a 2010s tech industry obsessed with manufacturing scale over meaning, I did feel charmed, like a snake. The overwrite clanged against my passion for climbing the pole as a dancer, while climbing the ladder of a homogeneous tech industry. The desires behind the declarations either shaped my decisions or reflected something earlier than memory.
It's 2026 now. Fifteen years after rediscovering my pencil smudges, I continue to work as a designer in tech—while the industry mutates dangerously. Tomorrow night I'll be onstage at the Castro Theater, dancing in Peaches Christ's Night of 1,000 Showgirls. I still invert 14 feet in the air on cold metal, often in 8" heels.
It feels right to me that this place where I pick up writing again pays homage to this cryptic thing a child wrote down—the challenge and tangle of desiring to be more than one thing at once. Whatever I thought I wanted when I was six, it seems I haven't chosen better than Artist Manufacturer.
Welcome to an experiment in writing from this place.
I'm glad you're here.
Interested in your own copy of MY Book About ME? Here’s a link from Powell’s.