Day 35 Saturday 10/10/09
My thoughts of setting up a studio in the country were getting devoured by my fear of failing - the greatest devourer of dreams. My design soul was restless - increasingly so.

I was frustrated at my lack of practical action. My mind was full of questions about my ability and my goals. I wasn't sure who I was working for, even why I was a designer at all.  At around 10pm I decide to give my mind a rest. Within 20 minutes I was up again writing the following:

"This is not about looking at how 'Designer X' or 'Studio Y' do it, or trying to replicate it. Why would you want to be like other people? You are you. This is about who I am and why I work. I ask myself, am I good at this? Who determines that? Am I passionate about graphic design? I continually appreciate observing it and crafting it in my mind. I love to solve problems. Is that a passion? What else am I going to do? I don’t know. That is why I came to work with Oded.

I am so desperate to understand who I am. I am from Cheshire. I want to succeed and be good at what I do. Why did I not study architecture? [Draws a house] Maybe I should? I’m waiting on some kind of unobtainable eureka design moment. Why do I want to be in Cheshire when there are more opportunities in London? Saying that, there are also more people in London. I don’t want to work in London.

I want to make work with a deeper philosophical/poetic depth or reasoning. Is there space for that commercially? Or is it art? Maybe I am a typographic artist and not a graphic designer? I am engaged with typography and I want to express it in a poetic, emotional, engaging, philosophical way. I dislike our current state of society. I have no desire to play in it. I have no desire to have 10,000 results on Google. My culture is telling me that I should have."

Day 36 Sunday 11/10/09
Today I tried to work but couldn’t shake the cloud. Only four months had passed since graduation. I hadn't expected to be feeling like this about my future. Later in the evening Oded called to ask how my week had been. I told him the truth, of course, that it had been awful.

"Very few know how to fail. Almost all are afraid of failing." He tells me, "When you are out of your depth, you will feel as though you are failing. This is a good thing. Recognised success builds complacency, pressure and expectancy. It is far better to fail while trying to follow your own path than to chase "success". The truth is that no one is actually looking at "you"; everyone is looking at themselves and talking about themselves, even when it doesn't seem so. The pressure is imaginary. You are free." 

I began to understand that I had been so afraid of failing that it was gradually freezing my creativity and my freedom to create. I could do nothing other than generate ideas and present them for a 'pass' or a 'fail'. If they 'failed', it created a mental struggle until I thought up something that 'passed'. Failure breeds success. Fear of failure breeds nothing. Success breeds nothing.

Time to begin again.

Read Lucy's first entry here, and stay tuned for the next installament of Lucy's Design Diary next week. In the meantime, check out Lucy Brown Studio on jotta.