My Career, Part Two

To anyone just coming across this blog, Part One was written a couple months back,over here.

So, fast forward to about 1997. I had originally decided to spend the year after high school getting my head straight and ready for college. Instead, I woke up one morning in an apartment with a pregnant wife, a 1980 Chevette and more questions about my direction in life than I did at graduation. No time for me to worry about them, though. I had an 80-hour work week as a pizza delivery driver. It’s funny how the real world can punch you in the face…

I had taken every opportunity to polish my design skills up to this point, taking any gig – paying or not – to grow as a designer. In Chesapeake, Virginia and its blue-collar workforce, there was no way I was going to make it as a graphic designer in my situation. So, when you have to work 12 hours a day to keep food on the table, and no time to be picky about where the money comes from, passions tend to take a back burner. I turned to designing out of pure enjoyment, developing mock logos and posters on my downtime. For the next couple years, and what seemed to be the foreseeable future, I had to worry about making a buck with a 20 year-old subcompact and learning how to be a father.

Eventually, after learning how to re-build a car multiple times over, the Chevette finally tapped out. Now without remotely reliable transportation, the only logical path that I could see with still limited resources was management. Sometimes, I think back to those long summer days of delivering pizzas in a car with no air-conditioning, no power steering, no power brakes and an exhaust leak, and I wonder how I made it out alive.

I would end up managing pizza joints at a higher pay and slightly less hours, which enabled me to get serious about my design passion again. I would stick with this glamorous profession for the next four years, through a divorce, as much college as I could possible attend, and a million other stories that I will kindly spare you from until I publish them, until I had reached my boiling point in 2004. I was within spitting distance of thirty and still had no idea where I was going. I only knew that my passions were fatherhood, music and design, and I’m not pretty enough to launch a music career. On a phone call with my brother while closing down a Domino’s one night, he gave me a piece of simple, yet poignant advice that I will never forget: “If you want to make something out of your design work, go where the clients are”.

I saved up my pennies and, on June 1, 2004, I packed up my belongings into a U-Haul and set out for Washington, DC. I had a room at my brother’s apartment and that was it. I had no job, no money and knew hardly anyone, let alone potential clients. I ended up taking a surreal job at BWI airport as a staffing coordinator for 10 new restaurants, which was a pretty intense job, but hey, I’m the master of long hours, right? After about a month of 24-26 hour shifts, I quit. I got in my ’94 Explorer and went home. On that trip home, I decided that, if I was going to “make something out of my design work”, I was going to have to get serious, which meant taking some risks…