In an alternate life, I don’t work in branding because I’m a hippie. I think about that version of myself every once in a while. That me is living in a yurt, growing lots of green things. She probably does fiber arts. She definitely brews her own kombucha. It makes me happy to think of her, and I know that’s a life I would have enjoyed if that’s the path I had taken. But I didn’t — because I’m here, writing about taking the right path and reflecting on a career in branding.
Looking back now, it’s incredible how close I was to taking that other path. My husband and I were dirt poor and pregnant, and we knew we needed to make a decision. One path led to staying in Maine and getting that yurt, for real. He was a woodworker’s apprentice, and I would cobble something together to earn a living while making a home for us in the wilds of a state I love. The other path led to New York City, where we originally met, and where I had friends and a freelance job in advertising waiting for me. Which one was the right path?
My primal self took over, and we said goodbye to the unrealized fantasy of our life in Maine and moved back to New York City. I slept on the floor of my friend’s apartment while I made enough money to cobble together the first month’s rent on an apartment of our own, while my husband closed down our life up north. When he joined me a few weeks later, he went back to his old job as a moving foreman. Together, we made a home so that we had a nest to center our life around when our son arrived.
I sometimes think about where staying in Maine and taking that other path would have led us. Would I have rediscovered writing earlier? Would my sons have become different people? Would we have crashed into the reality of being truly poor and fallen apart? Or would we have thrived in the hard face of it?
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Like all of us, I am here, and I am the result of paths I have chosen, large and small, every day. Who knows what decisions I’ve made that have altered the reality of my life and the lives of those I love. What was waiting for me on the other side of any one of those decisions? Was there really a right path? It’s impossible to know, and strangely, that gives me comfort.
So what’s the lesson in all of this? For me, it’s that the right path doesn’t matter if you remember who you are while you’re on it. Because whichever direction you take, you will be you. For many years, I kept my hippie heart hidden away while I chased career success. That’s what I regret — not the path I took, but that I didn’t always remember who I was, and I invested some of my journey into things that weren’t worth it.
What I realize now is that you have to stay true to who you are at your core, always. I love branding and storytelling, and I might not have learned that if I had taken that other path. Branding deals with the heart and soul of a company, and companies are just as fragile and imperfect as people are — it’s what I find so fascinating. But it’s also why it’s so important to me that I work for brands that are worth my lifeblood. Because I only have so much lifeblood to give.
The people you surround yourself with and the environment you work in are contagious. That means that what you do for a living can either diminish you or it can enhance you. Sometimes, like me, you’re going to need to make a choice that helps you simply survive — and that’s OK. You don’t need to sacrifice yourself for a perfect ideal. But you can also remember who you are and what you care about, and make sure that whatever path you take, you don’t forget who you were when you started.