Losing (and Finding) My Edge

Finding my creative voice when life is more taxi driver than creative trailblazer.

Three decades define mine, and many of my peers’, creative careers.

Not the decades in which we operated as professionals, but the decades of our lives.

My 20s. My 30s. My 40s.

My 20s
Finding a Voice

In my twenties I was finding a voice.

Or maybe more accurately, discovering that I had one.

This was the decade of pushing boundaries. Experimenting with process, technique, and delivery. Chasing new trends while digging through old references. Learning from the old guard just long enough to earn trust, then trying to bend the rules myself.

It was the time in my life when I felt the most creative and the most productive.

I had creative outlets everywhere. Outside of work and inside of it. Music. Craft beer. Cooking. Posters. Photography. Whatever form curiosity took that week.

Everything felt creative.

Every ride down a hill. Every paddle into a wave.
Every show bill on a telephone pole.

Every experience was influence.

The unique thing about that decade is that I was establishing a voice without realizing it. I wasn’t trying to articulate it.
I was simply making things.

Building a voice was an act, not a theory.

The path was laid by walking it, not by architecting it.

In hindsight, there was freedom in that.
I wasn’t trying to perceive myself.
I wasn’t worried about how the work defined me.

I was just making.

My 30s
Finding a Place

In my thirties I was finding my place.

Where do I work?
Who are my people?
How do I climb this ladder of success?

Each opportunity felt evolutionary. Each decision sat somewhere between innovation and business. Every year the balance shifted a little more toward the latter.

Early in the decade I was still taking risks. But responsibility arrived quickly. Home ownership.
Fatherhood.
Stability.

Decisions became more calculated.

Instead of walking a creative path through instinct and exploration, my dial began tuning toward the high-frequency pop stations instead of the dusty end of the indie dial.

I relied more on what others thought was good.
What others thought was important.

Not wrong. Not right.

Just the reality of growing up.

The walking path slowed and became a talking path.

My hands spent more time on a QWERTY keyboard than on command hotkeys and right-click menus. I learned to manipulate Outlook the way I once learned to manipulate Quark.

Time on mountains and in the sea became rarer.

Music became something I listened to in the car instead of discovering in the wild.

By the end of this decade, my children became a creative outlet of their own.

They became a kind of project.

How do I create space for them to become the best versions of themselves?

My creative energy shifted from making things to facilitating opportunity.
At home and at work.

Designing organizations. Designing process.
Creating room for others to succeed.

Maybe that’s leadership.
Maybe it’s just aging.

The path was no longer made by walking.
And less and less by talking.

It became something closer to a plowed field.

You move forward hoping that what you do in front creates fertile ground for someone else to plant something meaningful.

My 40s
Losing the Edge

Now in my forties, the fertile ground sometimes feels like it’s drying up.

The edges I once played on have collapsed inward.

The days of sitting on a photocopier in the University District at 2:00 a.m. trying to create the perfect accidental artifact feel like distant mythology.

I find myself searching for interest again.

But lived experience in the creative industry has a way of clouding things with skepticism.

What once felt like adventure now sometimes just feels like work.
Do I even want to walk that path again?

And yet here I am, somewhere in the middle of this decade, realizing that I do.

I want to feel that edge again.
I want to create through doing.

Yes, I’m still a taxi driver.
Yes, I’m still a plow.

But maybe this is the moment to look backward just long enough to remember the feeling, then find a new sea to swim in.
A new hill to carve.

The challenge now is fear.

Because unlike my twenties, I’m responsible for a family.
A house.
A life that has been slowly sculpted over decades.

It’s a beautiful sculpture.
But it’s also heavy.

Still, I think this is a moment to rediscover smaller creative moments.

Moments that might look very different from the caffeine-fueled chaos of twenty years ago.
But moments that bring back the feeling.
Moments that remind me that creativity was never about youth.

Losing My Edge

Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.

I’ve never been wrong.

Maybe James Murphy captured something.

The arrogance.
The insecurity.
The strange awareness that younger creators are always coming up behind you.

And they are.

They will feel the same things we did.
The same excitement.
The same doubt.
The same creeping fear that maybe their best work is already behind them.

But maybe the answer isn’t chasing the old “I was there” moments.
Maybe the answer is finding a new edge.
Not one that matters to everyone else.

One that matters to you.

One that gives your brain that small hit of serotonin again.
One that quietly tells you: Walk out the door. Start making again.

Maybe the edge was never about youth.
Maybe it was always about curiosity.

And curiosity, if we’re lucky, never really leaves us.
Sometimes it just waits for us to start walking again.