Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Long Story Short

~ 2016-2017-ish ~


Enter me: Cruising after quitting my last design agency job, having sworn off consumer advertising, smokin’ a looot of weed from a cute lil vape. I started The Sunshine Express :) after an enlightening acid trip and built it during my manic drug phase. After a few unsuccessful and way-out-there iterations of what I wanted it to be, I landed on doing ‘good design for good causes’ and set out to create a volunteer ad agency that focused on designing amazing nonprofit branding to be able to compete for audience attention against for-profit companies (the aesthetic at the time was very clean/minimalist/tech-y). I had picked up a handful of nonprofit clients and an equal handful of volunteer designers and we were on our way within about 1.5 months. I work fast, it was pretty fun.

As life and luck would have it, the (amazing) volunteers I worked with kept having life stuff happen and some of them handed off larger, unfinished design projects back to me so they could take care of whatever was going on. It all sort of imploded within a 2-week span of time. On top of trying to create 3 new organizations branding from scratch on tight deadlines, trying to expand, and not having income at the time – it all became super overwhelming. I immediately ended the attempt to expand, wound down the volunteering portion, finished out the remaining design projects I had promised, and a few weeks later, got myself into recovery. I was 26-27 years old at the time.

Short Story Long

~ Jump to November 2025 ~

Enter me: 35, freshly napped, wildly hydrated. Definitely sober, therapized, steady paychecks, and all that.

I’m a fairly goal-oriented person, it comes with the territory of being super creative. Everything is a project to me. I mean everything. I like to see how well and fast I can fold my clothes when I do my laundry. About a month ago I got a new (human dog-bed) mattress that was 10,000x better than my (just human) old one and decided to sleep as long as humanly possible. I’m not joking, it’s like sleeping on Cloud 9.

I felt like I was catching up on eons of ancestral sleep debt. I let go of every goal, idea, project I was attempting to do (jiu jitsu & Bright Nights included). I let go of every relationship, dream, desire, and creative identity I had in my tiny Jess-frontal cortex and zzz’ed so hard I thought my brain turned off permanently. I figured if ‘it’ was meant for me at this stage in my life, ‘it’ would boomerang back to me, including speaking to other people… or breathing.

I slept for 2 weeks and did the absolute bare minimum, didn’t really talk to anyone. I wanted to witness which ‘its’ came back, which left for good, and which might be new. I noticed the friends of mine who reached out and the ones who didn’t – no shade or anything, just observing.

I kept my day job, because, well, money, and I do like my job. I let go of some expectations I didn’t realize I was carrying around and felt much lighter. I easily kept my sidegig as an EMT – it’s super fun, that was a no-brainer.

I honestly didn’t know if I’d ever make art again but I was okay with it, I have at least 100,000 pieces of design work in my OneDrive folder, I’ve done enough. And sometimes sleep can be so good that it’s better than art. And drugs. And sex. And money. So be it.

Slowly over the next few days and weeks, I floated through the Void – or this time I would consider it the Sea of Tranquility. I wasn’t answering to capitalism (to be honest I haven’t done that since my mid-20s), I was heeding the call of a higher dimension: Trust. Faith. REM cycles.

***

After mentally frolicking through a trillion unknowns to get back to my naps, a new identity started trickling back in. Jess 8.0 was being built. It seemed she was cool with painting Japanese warrior scenes on surfboards. Jess 8.1 wanted to go back to her Indian Carnatic singing lessons. She beatboxed down the sidewalk. She liked walking across the street for a tasty non-caff boba or decaf fancy latte.

She enjoyed the hot tub at her apartment complex, definitely wanted to keep that. Jess 8.2 didn’t so much like her YouTube algorithm, so she started rebuilding that. Even though she doesn’t believe in closure (have you seen the DECE Method?) she needed to tie up some loose ends with a person she totally accidentally fell in love with a year prior and subsequently didn’t work out—for many reasons. Weirdly, even after saying the last bit of peace to him (it had to do with harmful evangelical religion rhetoric), it hasn’t seemed to end. Surely v8.3 would have pissed him off with that? The romance and love is most certainly gone, but what remains is an oddity and an open-ended unknown. Friendship maybe? He still wants to grab a coffee. v8.4 doesn’t really want to nor care, but it certainly didn’t go the way she thought it would. A three-quarter-boomerang, perhaps. Maybe I’m just mature-r than I thought I was.

***

Then, a 5-day weekend came where I wasn’t trying to do diddly squat and ended up having the most fun time. A giant pre-hospital emergency medical training, going on a lovely fall walk (I live in San Jose so it was hot af but had a nice crisp breeze), hanging out at the library and reading a book about the Trail of Tears ~ you know, something light.~ I was invited to a Sharks game and enjoyed some fancy Club seats on Military Appreciation Night (this is important to the story), hung out with a few friends and met some new ones.

That Sunday at my church job, there was an art show reception and I had submitted my Japanese surfboard – a lot of people came up and excitedly talked to me about it. I dropped by a friend’s party that afternoon and saw my family later. On Monday afternoon I had a meeting with a foster care agency I wanted to do some event volunteering with, the Director asked me if I was interested in designing an invite for one of their events and I lit up! I said heck yes, that’s my bread and butter. Then later that evening I hung out with the Bright Night girlies at Filoli’s last night for their Fall Festival event. It was a great string of days after 3 weeks of having my brain shut off – it was like I was coming back to life or something.

Then Tuesday arrived (of course it was 11/11) and completely out of left field I said, “holy f@%#%ing sh!#2@!%#t balls – I want to revive the idea of the creative agency for nonprofit branding and design.” Full force. 100% hell yeah. All in. Never been more sure of something in my life. I had honestly sort of forgotten I had even done that. It had been 8 whole years.

Way back when, two of the organizations I had done design work for were veteran-related. When I was hanging out with my veteran peeps at the Sharks game, it mentally popped up that time in my life where I was encountering just how messy organization-&-design-wise it was to get resources to vets. Then when I was offered to do design work randomly for a different nonprofit... It’s like the Universe was lobbing me a slow one at me over the span of 3 days and I didn’t realize until the last second – and then hit it out of the park anyway. Magical.

ALL OF THAT TO SAY THIS

~ Today, Wednesday, November 12 ~


I’m going to restart doing design for nonprofits. Except this time, it’ll just be me – I won’t try to do any crazy expansions, I won’t play match-maker between volunteer junior designers and brand new Executive Directors who know nothing about marketing or building nonprofits, I won’t feel like I’m carrying the entirety of the world’s issues on my tiny broad shoulders.

Just me, my bandwidth, my skills, and my velocity, seeing what I can whip up in the digital kitchen.


Welcome, Jess 8.5 – A little bit more refined.
I’m super glad to be here. :)