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The Martian Who Became a Graphic Designer

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By Lori Fagerholm, Guest Blogger

At the age of 27, as I was wrapping up the last semester of graphic design school, I sat down with my first real client to help brand her videography business.  A logo redesign and color palette project, this was exactly the kind of assignment I had trained for.  I had my laptop and my professional design software, and I knew how to use them.  The project was off to a great start, my client was happy with my work, and I was finally a "real" designer.  There was only one problem: I was miserable.

Why was I Miserable?

To answer that question, I have to start at the beginning.  I've been odd for as long as I can remember. At 5 years old, I picked out my first pair of eyeglasses: Strawberry Shortcake brand, with a cute little strawberry on each temple. But the frames were oversized, the lenses thick and the arms bent so as not to block my peripheral vision-you know, the kind of glasses you usually don't see on anyone under the age of 60. I was the kid who wore protest t-shirts to school while the rest of the girls had on the latest Guess sweaters, who couldn't hit a ball to save my life while my peers were joining the JV softball team. I was a directionless, daydreamy artist among sporty overachievers.

That was alright.  School was just practice for the real world, like a virtual reality simulation of life.  My real life would begin once I chose a career, graduated from college and got The Dream Job.  Sound familiar?  Many of us grow up hearing this fairy tale.  Long after we stop believing in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, the happily-ever-after myth of The Career endures.

It took five years and a lot of soul-searching, but I finally love my work. Here's what I learned that turned work from a ball and chain to an exciting, if still sometimes scary, adventure:

  1. My occupation is not my identity.  I recently ran into an old acquaintance at a book reading, a cool guy who used to run my favorite neighborhood bookstore but whose name now escaped me.  "Hey, Pegasus," I said, calling him by the name of the store.  With exaggerated-though I think genuine-angst, he replied, "I am not my job!"  We both laughed, but I think we both also felt the undertone of exasperation this oversimplification of identity can bring.  Creatives may be more resistant to this type of categorization than others.  Some of us feel both deep aversion to the traditional career path and a sense of despair at our inability to conform to the norm.
  2. I am not alone. Once I realized I wasn't the only one who sometimes found the experience of work, any work, unbearable, I began to realize that maybe I wasn't, for example, the sole surviving Martian infant who crashed to Earth in UFO and got discovered by a human couple who decided to raise me as their own.  We're wired to be a tribal species, after all, so finding others like me finally made me feel at home-and more human.
  3. My weirdness is not a liability-it's a blessing.  Okay, it's not always a blessing.  I still struggle with anxiety and a sense of a lack of purpose, sometimes mightily.  But as a designer and writer, my clients expect me to think creatively, to be an innovative problem solver, and to think "outside the box", if you'll pardon the cliché.  My personal challenge has always been thinking inside the box.  Being unusual, well, that's not a problem.  The more positive feedback I get, the stronger my feeling that I've finally found my niche.
  4. Traditional ways don't usually work for me.  As a freelancer, I get to set my own hours and work my own way, even if that means working in my pajamas on the back patio.  That feeling of freedom helps to offset the sense of constriction I sometimes feel when I'm not particularly inspired or I'm having a stressful workday.
  5. Everything everybody told me was wrong.  Maybe that's a little dramatic, but not by much.  For years, I resisted the urge I'd had since the age of 14 to start my own business, believing my mother was right about the instability and uncertainty of freelancing.  The voice in my head telling me I could do it, and that I might not be happy working any other way, finally got louder than all the external voices.  The first few years were rough, but I'm making better and steadier money than I ever did working for somebody else.  That's not to say I'll never go back to the 9-to-5.  Now that I know I can enjoy my work, that secret dread that maybe I had nothing to contribute, has also begun to melt away, and I know I can be a valuable part of a team.

This is not to suggest that I'm completely at peace with this whole work thing.  Maybe I never will be. I'm a bit of an anachronism, somebody who'd have been more at home a few thousand years ago, when archaeologists say indigenous people dwelled in huts, lived communally and hunted, gathered and worked only an average of four hours a day.  Sounds pretty great to me.  But we live in a different world nowadays, and I'm happy to say, I finally feel like a part of it.


About the Author

Lori Fagerholm
Graphic Designer, Illustrator and Writer

Lori Fagerholm PhotoLori Fagerholm is a graphic designer, illustrator and writer specializing in educational worksheets and promotional materials.  Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Lori enjoys travel and is working on adopting a location-independent business style.  Lori loves the flexibility of freelance work and is sure it’s worth the extra work and cost—well, pretty sure.

See samples of Lori’s work on her portfolio blog.





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