#emptyboxes

I don’t really recall where it came from or why it was said, but God, do I remember it.

I was at Aunt Pam and Grandma Betty’s house. I’m not sure if I was showing her my work, but I remember my mother saying to me, “You need to learn how to draw.” There was no further explanation, just a put-down of my artistic expression.

Adolescent me was taken aback. I was sitting on my knees at the coffee table with crayons in my hand and a white piece of paper with something scribbled on it that doesn’t make sense to me now. I finally got the gall to respond with a whimper to avoid getting slapped: “Not everyone can draw.” Honestly, my own self-defeat about not everyone being good at drawing, plus her words, made it easy for me to back away from the crayons and paper.

This sentence became the foundation and further confirmation whenever anyone judged something of mine. I recall drawing and creating stories all the time. I had pages of weird story ideas, like my rabbit spin-off of the Ninja Turtles. Grandpa would give me these white legal pad-length sheets to draw on, and I would get right to it.

Then one day, I stopped.

I don’t remember deciding to stop. I don’t remember what the last drawing was. But by the time I was in middle school, I was reminded by peers that what I made wasn’t good enough. I would write stories that people told me weren’t good (ok, sure, I remade Vampire in Brooklyn to be Vampire in Baltimore, but damn, I didn’t need to get dissed that hard). Of course, I wasn’t good at this. I’m not creative. I can’t even draw.

Why did I just stop one day? My preteen wars with puberty and isolation along with my sudden transformation into a poor student probably didn’t leave enough space for creation when my parents weren’t constantly punishing me. Or maybe I was comfortable just sitting on the sidelines watching others create. I was such a hip hop head. Surely I couldn’t be as creative as them. I found the little outlets that I’ll write about later (such as my rap scrapbook of 1998-99), but I was so afraid to show them that I kept them tucked in my bedroom. Do they really count if no one sees?

I find myself reliving that moment when I see my kids’ work, and I refuse to tell them how macabre it is at times. Ok, macabre is incredibly harsh, but sometimes I have no idea what the hell it is, and you know what that’s ok.

Taking Design Studio and learning from that awful Rudolf Arnheim book that when children draw they are “engaging in ‘intellectual realism’ rather than visual imitation, representing the basic structure rather than photographic detail.” Kids aren’t failing to draw, but are inventing the representation of something from their view. So perhaps I didn’t suck at drawing as a child; I was just being a child, expressing myself.

Why are those words just so sharp in my mind? It’s amazing to me how words and moments that could otherwise mean nothing to someone could be a defining moment in the foundation of someone’s life. I continued to write but limited myself to journalistic writing. I could only do fact-based reporting in articles or essays. None of the narrative plot-driven things. I didn’t even like doing feature articles. Just straight hard news for me.

Somehow, I became a professional graphic designer, and I still feel uncomfortable making preliminary sketches of my work because I’m concerned about how they’ll look. I don’t even like my handwriting, so I refuse to share my notes. Hell, I practice signing cards on a blank sheet of paper to make sure it doesn’t appear too illegible.

That’s the question, right? I don’t know. I needed a place to write and the world to see it while simultaneously knowing no one would see this. A whole WordPress blog feels too intense. A substack and slanging newsletters feel cheesy. But a Tumblr using the name of my original account that I’m sure no one will see because I’m not popping in any way, shape, or form on the net….perfecto “chef’s kiss”. 

But what’s with this title? I honestly don’t know. I had some philosophical ideas when I came up with the original title while stacking merchandise for America’s favorite bulk box store and saw people crashing out over the best boxes (usually from produce). Maybe I thought we should be charging for these, or maybe it was from when I was moving and asked Wal-Mart for a buggy of boxes, and they gave me one. 

Like a dork, I went to America’s favorite waste of water and environmental polluter, and it actually gave me some decent insights into where I was going with it after describing where I was in life and where I was working, as well as some background on my original idea. HOWEVER, they are too on-the-nose and philosophical. 

At the end of the day, an empty box is just that. An empty box. For a big box store, it’s trash. A nuisance. By-products of preparing to peddle goods to the public. They are free because they lack value, and you are doing the corporation a solid. They don’t have to worry about disposal, and they get free labor to remove it. A win-win for capitalism. 

That same empty box is the container of someone’s life who is making a change. leaving an office or their parents’ home. Hell, the container that’s sending them back to their parents’ home or a different job. It’s the container of a life that doesn’t exist any longer. To be shoved into the back of a closet. Hidden from the day-to-day realities of the present. To a cat or some unfortunate unhoused individual, it’s a home. 

The empty box’s value is contingent on what you put into it. The value of something isn’t fixed; it’s based on context and need. That same corporation, giving away boxes at the end of its journey, values them so much more when they need to fill them with product. 

Yes, I know. A bunch of babbling, yapping, and nonsensical analogies to possibly make a ridiculous title work for a Tumblr page 15 years ago that spent more time thirst-following and reblogging than actually using it for the cringeworthy creations found at the crux of this whole thing. 

So what are we doing here now? Well….once again, like a dork, I was inspired. Somewhere at the intersection of listening to Cey Adams and Aaron Draplin wax poetically about their creative journeys on Design Matters and absorbing the writing of Jill Louise Busby and Ashley Ford, I had the epiphany to write about my journey or a graphic design timeline, if you will. So, of course, I planned out a list of moments and started writing drafts, and then just stopped. There’s nothing I love more than an abandoned project. The computer that I’m typing on is FILLED with creative moments that were abandoned for something else. 

Since I got a new role serving as the entry point to middle management, I needed to journal more often. Journaling became a release I didn’t know I needed. Once again, like a dork, I found myself on one of those fancy AI-assisted journaling apps. Not because I needed some LLM to tell me it’s okay and that I’m not a weirdo. I needed something to guide me when journaling. I would easily jump into a blank page in a notes app and write a barely coherent sentence about my day. “I mean… it was aight.” Not at all what was needed for documenting my day-to-day mindset or for fleshing out the feelings I’m consistently tucking away so I don’t appear to be a wuss (good ol’ 80s toxic masculinity at work). 

OK… but why are we here now with this title and this writing about your timeline? This title—as nonsensical as it is—was one of the few things I created as an adult that felt genuine to me. And perhaps all of these moments in my life are, at face value, empty boxes. A bunch of moments, baggage, and minutiae that don’t really mean anything in a vacuum, but pushed together, they lead me to what makes me… me. I wish I could be like some of my peers or the people I idolize who say they always knew they’d be… this. But I never felt that way. Being a designer was something I never imagined I’d do, and it wasn’t some clear, intentional path. It was something I ended up in. Something I grew into without really noticing.

So I’m trying to go back and look into all of the boxes. The moments that didn’t feel like anything at the time. The ones I dismissed, or forgot, or didn’t think counted. Maybe they do. Sitting down and finally unpacking all of these moments can finally answer the question I led with. 

I received an e-ARC of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

And it's really not to my taste much at all. It felt extremely cliched and over the top, because Rita's experience seems to have been the kind to go from bad to worse to even worse still. There are time jumps in the story, but I soon found myself thinking of them as title screens in a TV show; I can understand that it's realistic, an investigation into nefarious goings on is going to take time, but it started to bug me quite early on into my read.

The action felt very written-for-screen, and extremely one-up-ish, by which I mean the action starts pretty early on and apparently has to ramp up to keep the plot moving, resulting in the antagonist's actions eventually feeling quite ridiculous at times. I doubt I'll read any more of the series, it really isn't for me.