A year into my job, my boss promotes me to lead a small design team. Another year passes and my partner encourages me to try freelancing to pick up a larger variety of work.

I’m making websites, same as before, but I’m also doing design consulting, branding and identity, events-related work. Some time later, Eugene Kan gives me the opportunity to co-host a podcast, conduct interviews, do editorial production, write and publish for MAEKAN, and I run with it.

By accepting different projects, increasingly unexpected opportunities come my way. In the three years since I starting shifting away from visual design, my partner, my closest friends, the only person who ever bought a piece of artwork from me, the people I’ve interviewed and writers I’ve edited have told me how well-suited I am to the work I’m doing now.

The thing is, I didn’t know that I’d be good at research, interviews, writing, and speaking, and every time someone says so, it makes me wonder why I didn’t see that in myself.

Since I was five, I pictured myself as a visual artist getting awards on stages and I doggedly chased that image. I wasn’t wrong about having some talent and some taste, and I definitely put in the work. However, maybe who you can be isn’t always obvious to yourself. I didn’t shift gears for compliments, but because I was intrigued by the possibility of winding up somewhere I didn’t see myself going.

Learning how my work as a writer, podcaster, interviewer and editor resonated with others helped me see a different kind of challenging and fulfilling future.

Childhood me had a one-dimensional dream, and while striving for it got me a long ways, hitting refresh on that dream has allowed me to be a more complex person in possession of greater possibilities.