The Approach

I’m in my room, Damien Rice playing, and I realize I haven’t touched a real book in what feels like forever. Or I have, but only ones I had to read—for class, for credentials. Now there’s a stack of design books on my nightstand and I’m working through them like they’re instruction manuals for becoming the person I’m trying to be.

I’ve wanted to make things for a long time. Actually make them, not just think about it. In school when they made you pick a direction, I knew what I wanted. But I also knew enough to be scared, so I picked something that looked safer on paper. Applied somewhere else when I didn’t get in the first time. Met good people on that detour. Spent a year studying something practical that felt like growing up and making the sensible choice. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t the thing.

Now I’m actually about to do the thing, and I’m terrified in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Not the normal pre-big-change anxiety, but something weirder—this constant voice saying I got lucky in an interview, that they’ll figure out I’m not as trained as the people who actually prepared, that I’ve been fooling myself this whole time.

The reading is partly genuine and partly panic. I keep thinking if I read enough, absorb enough, prepare enough, the feeling of not belonging will go away. It hasn’t yet. The fear’s still there.

But they did let me in. They talked to me for hours and said yes. That has to mean something.

I don’t know if this is what it feels like for everyone before something that actually matters, or if I’m just good at finding reasons to panic. The rain’s coming down. The books are waiting. I’ve got months before this starts and I’m already trying to compress years into reading I can do at night.