This is my bio as it currently stands. It means very little to me. Like many other things such as résumés or job titles, a bio is a practical tool to navigate the world. It’s no different from the knife you’d slice your food with — it’s not the food itself, it just makes it easier to eat. Indeed a crucial instrument to possess, and yet it carries no real significance beyond its practical function. So this is the buffed and polished version of “what I do”, the kind you’d read on my LinkedIn profile, or a stuffy grant application. And you’re going to need it in order to orient yourself as I tell you the story of what I actually do.

* * *

It’s a heady kind of power to make things that let you make-believe. To create objects that function as portals into a world that operates on a more straightforward, childlike logic than the world we live in. One that’s just malleable enough that you can bend and twist reality until the world feels right… like it’s supposed to… like it never does in real life. A world where heroes do heroic things, monsters meet their match, love works the way they say it does, your annoying coworker gets fired like he should, and you give a rousing speech at the end and everyone is convinced and no one doubts you ever again. 

I’ve been testing and honing that power for as long as I can remember. When we were children, my brother and I used to play games of make-believe all the time. We used to maintain a book of spells that we’d pull out every time the cable TV stopped working — and mind you, we fixed it with our made-up incantations more often than not. We used to run a covert ops agency called Spy Mission for a few years, and even roped two of our cousins in. Aside from spying on various members of our family to gather undefined intel, we used to conduct rather intense training sessions. Stealth training, for example (read: how not to laugh while sneaking around on all fours). I remember I made us all ID badges, complete with our pictures, aliases, designations and special skills. I still have mine somewhere. With those same cousins, we once organized a showcase for our families, with poetry and dance and a play. We made tickets that we sold out of a makeshift booth for ten bucks apiece. We had a green room (i.e. a green curtain that cordoned off a changing room (yes, we had costume changes)). We even created mood lighting with coloured paper lanterns that we encased the existing light fixtures with. We nearly burned the house down with that one.

What really did it for me were the objects. The spell book, the ID badges, the show tickets, the “green room.” It’s like the objects were proof that we too could play in the same world the adults played in, that we could own the same baubles, and not only own them but have agency over them. Making the objects could make our version of the world real, could pull it into our physical realm. The adult world was made up of objects after all, so if we could make our own objects, we could make our own world.

Those were the more obvious kinds of make-believe, though. There were less obvious ones, and somehow, those were even better. Back in the early 2000s, before Google was the omniscient god that it is today, I remember I painstakingly transcribed and typed up the lyrics to the entire Lion King soundtrack. I printed them out on our home computer and stapled them together to produce a book of lyrics, complete with cutouts of Timon and Pumbaa and Simba pasted alongside the songs. Being a bookmaker today, I’m realizing this was probably the first book I ever made. I continued doing things like that for school assignments, book reports, my brother’s book reports… I was the person you went to to make things look “legit.” And my skills of artifice only got better with time as I moved from amateur to professional.

I’ve made a lot of different things over the years, but books have proven to be my favourite by far. I was recently chatting with a fellow book designer who was telling me how books are symbols of power and status. Not everyone has the means to produce a physical book. They carry a kind of legitimacy within them. You’d think books are pretty ubiquitous everyday objects. And yet when I create a book — from planning to designing to printing and producing — and put it in someone’s hands, you can see a glimmer of that same wonder in their eyes. For all its ubiquity, books are pretty mystical objects to most people. A writer could write a manuscript but would need a designer or publisher to turn it into a real book with typesetting and page numbers and a cover and a spine. There’s a long way to go from seeing a book in your head to holding it in your hands, and what happens in between is mostly invisible to you. But I could do that from start to finish. It was magic.

And that was where the line would blur for me, where make-believe wasn’t really make-believe anymore. It began to bleed into and fuse with my reality. I didn’t have to confine myself to creating objects for an imaginary world, I could create them for this world. My skills felt almost clandestine; it’s like I knew how to hack the physical fabric of the real world and covertly insert my own objects into it. Knowing how to make things gave me access to some secret door that separated what the world was from what it could be. And now I was able to freely come and go between them. Most people eventually shut that door and resign themselves to the way things are. They forget that making things has the power to push the world just a tiny bit closer to whatever they want it to be. 

And I’m not talking about losing yourself in a world of fantasy and delusion. I’m talking about creating things in the more ideal world in your head and then bringing those objects back into this world — this rather bleak world — where they proceed to act upon and transform your reality in a tangible way. In my first year of art school, I created a fake history textbook called Grandma Wars that satirized my difficult relationship with my grandmother. What was otherwise my rather horrifying lack of sympathy for a frail old lady was suddenly made funny. Digestible. Relatable. I’d always been a tiny bit alien to my friends and family, but my work could give them ways to decode me more easily. Just like this book is doing now.

I would watch or read stories with protagonists like Holden Caulfield and Don Draper and Mersault whom you’d probably loathe if you met in real life. And yet somehow, a story could not only make you tolerate them but actively root for them. Again, it was a kind of magic. And I saw no reason why we couldn’t wield that magic to the same effect in real life. If something was unrelatable, we could make it familiar. If something was alien, we could make it belong. If something appeared dangerous, we could make it feel safe. There was practically nothing that couldn’t be transformed by a story told right.

You’ll notice I haven’t once said anything about jobs or careers or income. I’ve talked about the things I’ve done as a child, as a college student, as an adult, all in the same breath. Because there is no break in continuity. Whatever else I’ve done, I’ve never stopped creating things. I could be clichéd and say my work is my life. But that would be misleading, because that still suggests some kind of distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’, as if one has to be subsumed by the other in order for them to unite. What I’m saying is that, when it came to the work that actually mattered to me, I could never think of it as “doing work”, not in a way that was any different from doing life.

A few years ago, I was with a friend who was lamenting about the slim pickings of her dating pool. I suggested she find a project or something to work on for a while, something compelling and meaningful to immerse herself in. And another friend of hers immediately said something like, “Oh, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to use work as a distraction from your personal life.” And in that moment, I realized we were on completely different pages. To them it sounded like I was saying she become consumed by her work to distract from her personal life. But to me, it was everything else that was distracting from what was truly important. I was suggesting she find a real anchor, something she was really itching to do, something that could ground and soothe and fill every gap so that no one else would ever need to play those roles. Because that’s what my work did for me.

You know how in the movies, there's the part where girl learns that she was betrayed by boy but then he writes her the perfect letter and she finally forgives him? Or maybe there's an unwinnable case in court but then the defendant makes a rousing speech and the jury acquits him? I couldn't see why the same couldn't apply in real life too. If it isn't working for you it's because you're bad at writing that letter/speech and could stand to get better at it. Because that's what creative people do. They have the skill to make things, write things, tell stories that can persuade people, change people. I know, for example, this very book has the power to make my father stop worrying about me like I know he does, worrying that I'm choosing to travel a path that's too wobbly and unstable. I know this can convince him that I know exactly what I'm doing, that I've always known exactly what I was doing. I know it can put him at ease, and that makes his life better and, by extension, mine too. I know all the ways the quality of my life improves in direct correlation to my work. 

Work wasn’t something that took away from life, it was something that added to it. It could make life better, happier, easier, exciting, sensible, everything. Writing had the ability to make sense of the senseless. (Like pretty much anything I’ve ever tried to write.) Art could bring back things that were lost. (I made my brother a palm-sized diorama of his childhood room when he moved to Germany.) It could preserve things that were fading. (I created my graphic memoir The Breadcrumb because I was terrified of losing myself and needed something to find my way back. And I’ll have you know it worked, thank you very much.) It could fix and strengthen relationships. (On at least two occasions, a long email to my parents has ironed out years’ worth of things they’ve struggled to understand about me.) It could fill your empty voids and soothe your existential angst. With everything I make, I become more complete in myself, I regain a kind of structural integrity. Making things is like a form of remembrance. Every new object helps recall some part of myself that I once knew but have forgotten since. And it preserves it in a real, tangible object so it can’t be lost again. A little bit like Voldemort’s horcruxes in Harry Potter, but maybe not as dark…

This book is written primarily for a creative audience, yes. But I subscribe to the broadest definition of creativity, namely, the ability to create. That includes artists, designers, writers, filmmakers, musicians… But it also includes researchers and academics. Coders and web developers who like making fun new things. That lawyer who knows the power of a well-written monologue. The salesman who knows how to build a persuasive pitch deck. The business consultant who comes up with a solution no one else thought of. Creativity is not a profession, it's an aptitude possessed by anyone who knows that the world is endlessly, infinitely mutable.

It doesn't matter what you create — an email, a PowerPoint presentation, a comic, a painting, a song, a book, a film. Anything you touch, anything you manipulate with your mind and hands is an opportunity to push your world just a little bit closer to what you want it to be. And isn’t that what we’re all trying to do in our “personal lives” anyway? To make sense of things, to remember what’s lost, to preserve what we’re losing, to heal, to soothe, to understand, to connect? What if you didn’t have to make time to do those things off the clock? What if you could do them during your “workday”? That’s the agency I’m talking about. The freedom to make your life all about the itch you really want to scratch.

There’s a reason I’ve chosen the company of artists and academics. They’re the only two people I know who try to construct a career around whatever itch they really want to scratch — not as a hobby, not as a side hustle, but as a livelihood. Unfortunately, they struggle to configure the mechanics of their career in a way that actually lets them spend their time scratching that itch. They’re often supported by and therefore entangled in complex institutional structures that consume large chunks of their time and energy. Academics are often weighed down by teaching and administrative work, eagerly awaiting their sabbaticals to do what they actually want to be doing. Some artists get swallowed up by “the industry” that has the power to turn illustrators into UX designers of all things (two utterly different professions!), while others spend their time filling out lengthy grant and residency applications. Most of these people are doing what they truly want only during their downtime. So while their professional intentions are not necessarily offbase, they haven’t figured out how to assert agency over their time. Everything boils back down to time. And most people haven’t learned how to slowly buy their time back from the systems that support them. They often don’t even realize they can do that. Most people are only aware of one model of time-reclamation: retirement. Which is the most depressing one out there. There’s a reason I operate on the fringes of various disciplines and industries, never quite committing to any one of them. I treat them like whirlpools. They’ll suck you in if you let them. But I’ll talk more about evading systems and reclaiming your time in later chapters. 

For now, let’s talk about the itch you want to scratch. How do you find it? In my experience, the answer lies on the other side of this question: What’s the one thing you’d gladly do for free?

* * *

The answer might actually surprise you. It may not be what you think it is. Especially if you’re someone who’s already in the vicinity of generally enjoyable work, you might assume you already know. If you’re a researcher, maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I’d gladly write for free.” Maybe. Maybe not. I’d recommend that you dig deeper with that question and put aside whatever you think the answer is supposed to be. What would you gladly do for free? Gladly is the operative word here. For all you know, you might already be doing it without realizing it. It’ll find ways to leak out of you. You might not consider it “work” at all. You may even be doing it in ways that feel destructive or obtrusive to the current pattern of your life. It might very well present as a menace or vice or guilty pleasure you’re unable to control. Maybe you spend your time obsessively following celebrity feuds online, or maybe you’re constantly rehearsing imaginary arguments in the shower, or painstakingly pointing out every typo you spot in public signage. I know the current era of “content creators” and “influencers” has now made it possible to imagine how some of those things could indeed be translated into an income-generating activity. But I need you to dig deeper than that and think about the question in a more timeless fashion that transcends the current generation we’re in. It’s not just about what’s fun and frivolous to you. What is it that you really can’t help doing because it appears to scratch a deeper itch?

See, if I asked people to guess what I would do for free, they’d probably say I’d make miniatures. Or books. They’re not entirely wrong. But they’re not on the mark either. I’d certainly grumble if I had to do those things for free. Books and miniatures are hard work. You know what I wouldn’t grumble about, though? Making elaborate, insane, custom gifts for people. I’ve made tiny dioramas for my friends that recreate scenes from their lives, for no reason besides a random whim to do it. I’ve been commissioned by my brother and his friends to produce ridiculous gag gifts, like a set of finger-skateboards with Photoshopped surface graphics referencing their weird little inside jokes. I’ve memorialized someone’s pet dog in miniature. I’ve made someone a tiny photo album as a farewell gift. This is what I’ve found every excuse to do my whole life. It's the thing that’s more fun for me than anything else, and I’ll happily cast aside other “important” work to do it. I’ve done it when I’ve had no time, no energy, no sleep. I’ve done it when no one has asked for or expected it. I’ve done it for fun, without any reason or occasion. I’ve said yes to it even when I’ve been up to my ears in other paid work. I’ve happily agreed to it when the budget was meagre or even non-existent. You’ll often find me cursing myself when I’m up at 3 AM, sleep deprived, working on some ridiculous little object no one asked me to make. I’ve all but pounced on every excuse to do it, no matter what the personal cost. It’s the thing I can’t bear to say no to, even if to my own detriment.

Identifying that impulse is only the first step though. It’d take quite some finagling to (a) diffuse some of its self-sabotaging features and (b) turn it into a career that can actually satiate you on every level. When I first realized this was the work that truly lit me up more than anything else, I was a little afraid of the implications. What if this meant I’d be perfectly happy running one of those bespoke gifting companies that could put your face on a coffee mug or write you a personalized birthday jingle? Did I secretly want to be the next Ferns N Petals? [1] *Shudder* Surely, as cerebral as I was, I couldn’t be satisfied doing something so corny and generic and intellectually impoverished, could I? And what about making books and writing and making miniatures? I enjoyed those things too, they filled me up in a different way — not quite as effortlessly as this, but I didn’t want to give them up either. No. There was clearly a more complex configuration I needed to find that could account for all of those things. 

[1] India's largest one-stop gifting solutions company, offering a wide range of products including fresh flowers, cakes, plants, personalized gifts, décor, and event services.

It took me a decade to arrive at the exact right formula. I pretty much meandered my way towards it, operating on instinct and doing whatever I felt like, whatever felt practical and prudent at every turn. I went to art school because I knew it’d let me continue playing games of make-believe. The classes I took made me discover my love for miniatures and academic research and experimental storytelling. I learned how to design books for real and where to get them printed. I freelanced as a graphic designer because I enjoyed that too, the process of responding to a brief and making something for someone besides myself. 

I liked doing everything and I didn’t like to choose. So I didn’t. I continued pursuing all these different strands in parallel. I was an artist who produced experimental stories like The Dollhouse Project. I did writing and research on the side. I consulted as a freelance graphic designer (although I did eventually narrow that down to just publication design, which was the only kind of design I truly enjoyed). And while they all occasionally intersected with one another, I knew I was missing some crucial piece that could unify them all. A few years later, when I did my masters at RISD, I discovered the form of the “artist book” (i.e. making pretty much anything and calling it a “book”). And that’s when it clicked. [2] I realized I could take all the things I liked doing — writing, research, bookmaking, graphic design, even miniatures — and smush them all into a single object. It was the ideal container. And now I was going to build my whole career around making objects like that. [3] It was going to be my super power; the thing I could do better than anyone else.

[2] Specifically, it clicked when I produced this interactive essay for a class assignment.
[3] Watch this if you, like most people, have no earthly idea what I mean by that.

But this still only answered the question of form — the “what” and “how” of what I do. You need the whole triad to build the formula: the what, the how, the why. And the “why” for me always goes back to that wondrous look on people’s faces. The look that tells me I’ve performed some kind of magic. The look that says I’ve managed to successfully transport them to a different world, even if just for a moment. You see, I think the world is absolutely despicably awful to people. It’s designed to suck you dry of everything that’s good about you, and I’ve spent my whole life trying to nimbly step around its edges and evade it. 

All my life, I've been surrounded by people who feel stuck and tangled up all wrong in the complex web of systems and ideas the world has woven. But thanks to my lifelong evasive tactics [4], I've never let myself get too tangled up in its web, and so I’ve never felt quite as trapped. I've always been just a little bit removed from the world, never quite immersing in it as fully as everyone else does, only dipping a toe here and there. (That also means I don't feel much desire to do things like make normal friendships or celebrate birthdays or go to the beach, because they all feel just a little bit unnatural and not as enjoyable to me. But that's a story for some other time.) Engaging with the world has always felt a little like playing pretend, playing dress-up and acting like all these “very important things” mean anything at all to me.

[4] Which you can read all about in The Breadcrumb!

And when I make things for other people, they get to play pretend for a little while too. I like to listen to who they are and what matters to them, and try to suss out whatever they wish the world could be. And then they get to step outside of the world as it is, play with me for a little while where we create something within the logic of their make-believe world, and then they get to take that object back with them into the real world. And their real world is made just a tiny bit better because that object now exists in it, ready to revisit whenever they want. That’s what I got to do with the Detective Erin project I mentioned earlier. That’s what I want to do all my life.

I often think of myself as an artist who works like a designer. I love creating things of my own, but I also very much enjoy making things for other people. You see, if I had tried to squeeze myself into the traditional box of “being an artist”, I might have wrongly weeded out the designerly aspects of my being. I might have said no to the more commercial work or commissions like the Detective Erin project that could have been seen as beneath a highbrow “artist”. That’s why it’s important not to hastily shove the puzzle pieces into slots that you think might fit them. Don’t assume you know the larger picture until you actually know it. Operate on intuition, and if something doesn’t slide effortlessly into place, don’t force it and wait until you find the right slot for it. I continued my work as a designer because I knew there were many parts of it I liked enough to keep at it; and I took my time slowly weeding out the parts I didn’t enjoy until I was left with a piece that slid easily into place. I like the process of working like a designer, responding to a “brief”, working to make things for other people — and now I know how it fits into the bigger picture. To work like a designer whilst producing artistic objects for people. Things that are exactly calibrated to who they are and what matters to them. To put that look of wonder on their faces. The urge is even stronger when I come across people that I believe to be intrinsically good and earnest (or whatever my definition of “good and earnest” is anyway). The people who hold out and don’t succumb to whatever the world tries to turn them into. I think they have it even harder than the people who give in. And when I come across people like that — I may not even know them myself, they’re often people whose work I admire, like writers, artists, singers, actors, comedians, filmmakers… — I feel this uncontrollable, burning need to create something for them. Something good that they deserve, the kind of good that the world ought to reward them with but never does. And I’d be happy if I could play even the tiniest role in correcting that imbalance. 

That’s the itch I need to scratch, that’s the foundation my life vision is constructed upon. And you can see it pays no regard to what real-world job or industry it fits into — that seems like a silly, trivial thing to think about after all that, doesn’t it? In that vision, I get to spend my days crafting “books” that hold elaborate, insane worlds and stories. And probably doing a little bit of writing and teaching on the side, like I’m doing right now. I feel closer to that life now than I ever have before. It’s the reason I’m writing this at all; to freeze and preserve it just in case I lose it in the future, just in case the world succeeds in sinking its claws into me after all. It’ll be a way to remember the vision and whatever I did to inch my way towards it. 

Because a vision like that doesn’t just come into existence by magic or accident; it demands several practical things. I'm an idealist, yes, but I'm also an intensely practical strategist. A vision like that means I need to have the luxury to pick and choose who I work with. That means I have to afford to say no to other paid work that comes my way, no matter how high-profile. It means the work I say yes to needs to pay me well enough to sustain me through all the things I say no to. It means a project has to pay me well enough to buy back several months of my time. That means I need to be playing in the pro leagues and pricing at a premium. That means I need to build enough of a name for myself to pull that off, so that people will come to me specifically because they want to work with me, not just because they need someone to get the job done. That means I need to brand and market myself and my work to position myself as someone of that calibre. There are many strategic pieces that need to stack together over time to enable the vision. And over the coming chapters I'm going to break down the strategy behind each of those things and reveal the underlying logics that must guide them. 

This book is not a step-by-step guide to finances or personal branding or career planning. It's meant to reframe how you think and feel about those things, how you prioritize them and how you perceive their interconnectedness. It’s meant to help you find the central axis around which those tactical pieces must revolve. It's a shift in vantage point that will automatically set you up for a shift in your methods and strategies.

A free agent is someone who lives and operates outside the usual configuration of rules. It's not that they don't have rules — you'll have to have very many stringent rules for yourself — it's just that the usual ones won't apply. Call me lucky, but I’ve never really felt subject to the world. A bit like a visiting traveller: I’m here for now, but the law of the land has never quite applied. The rules other people choose to follow have appeared irrelevant to me. In fact the few times I have tried to follow them, my life has felt very very wrong, like shoving a square peg into a round hole and trying to brute-force it to fit. Mind you, you can brute-force two wrong things to slot together, but they’ll splinter in the process. And even once you've accomplished it, it'll never look or feel right. It'll always look like a misfit, an eyesore that’ll unsettle you every time you pause long enough to look at it. And I can't imagine if that's how other people feel all their lives. I’ve been wary of the world for as long as I can remember, engaged in a careful dance with it, continuously stepping around the many many square pegs it keeps thrusting in my path. It can be exhausting, yes, but over time your stamina improves and it gets easier and more automatic; practice makes anything perfect after all. It's the reason my sense of free agency has remained largely intact and uncompromised. And I'm hoping this book will break down the steps of that dance for you, so you can reconstitute your own sense of free agency that may have disintegrated over time. 

So start with the first question. What’s the thing you’d gladly do for free? Don’t worry if the answer is something that is disruptive to your life right now — it only feels that way because your life is currently configured full of shapes and slots into which this piece doesn’t fit. Answer it as honestly and intuitively as you can. And then we’ll embark on the long process of strategizing how to spin the rest of your life around it.