As a kid I knew who I was: an excellent artist. I was always hungry to exercise my creativity, even to the point of becoming anxious and restless if I wasn’t making things. This feeling would come over me, almost like a nervous fit, until I could draw or build and get that energy out.

My dad saw my artistic potential as soon as I began expressing it. One of my earliest memories is from when I was five; I drew a picture of birds in a tree and showed it to my dad.

I said, “Dad, this is the best picture I’ve ever drawn!”

He said, “You can do better.”

So I kept doing more and doing better. In middle school, I would draw agenda book covers and bookmarks to sell to my classmates. My dad started giving me design challenges that were helpful to his business. That kicked off a period of drawing logos for his labels, designing his artists’ MySpace pages, creating art for tours—essentially fulfilling music industry briefs as a twelve-year-old.

I continued consistently making, anything really, until a stretch of time shortly after finishing college. Suddenly, there seemed to be a million ways my career could go and it was no longer clear to me what I really wanted or needed and, crucially, who I was.

I wound up in a very structured environment as a strategist where I wasn’t making anything. Something was missing. A part of my soul felt absent. In the midst of the situation, I didn’t understand why I didn’t feel like myself.

It was only when I started making again that it hit me—I’d been missing for the last year and a half because I hadn’t made anything. That’s when I learned that being a creator is ingrained in who I am. I believe that everybody on this earth is creative, and that it is by creating things we express our full humanness.