I was sitting in some science class in high school (maybe AP physics??) next to my two friends who were both named Chris, playing the dot game. You know the one → grid of dots, you take turns drawing lines, whoever closes the last box on a square claims it. I was half listening the way I was always half listening and then…
“POP QUIZ!”
She thought she had me…I got a hundred. Highest grade in the class. My two Chrises looked at me like, how did you just do that, we weren’t even paying attention. I couldn’t tell you today what that lesson was even about and I’m honestly not even sure it was actually physics. None of that information stuck past the quiz. But in the moment I could see something on the board, process it, understand it and hand it back.
Understand fast, forget fast, move on.
You see, I don’t have a long term photographic memory. I don’t actually even know if short-term photoraphic memory is a thing but that is how I have described it. I could study my notes in the hallway on the way to class and make A’s with less effort than my fellow classmates.
It made regular subjects easy and easy things bored me. I always wanted a puzzle.
My grandma used to comment on how strange I was with actual jigsaw puzzles. Everyone she knew found the edge pieces first and worked their way in. I’d lay the pieces out and start grouping by color, by pattern, by anything that looked like it belonged together and build little clusters that would eventually connect to each other. Didn’t matter if a piece was an edge or dead center. It always came together. I just never built it the way anyone told me to.
The pattern behind the pattern
Art was the first thing that felt like both a puzzle and a challenge at once. By senior year I’d taken every art class my school offered, so my teacher set me and one other girl up with an independent study. Individual assignments, each with an open ended brief and a medium to complete them with. Acrylic, watercolor, oil, whatever the project called for and figure out what you wanted to do with it.
The other girl went realist and portraiture on every single one. Beautiful, detailed, Renaissance level work.
I was a little envious of it. To be that clear in her lane and to be able to execute with such skill was impressive.
Then we got a brief to paint something at three different scales, actual size, then zoomed in, then zoomed in again all using acrylic paints. I chose Gobstopper packaging.
That was the project that made my teacher ask if I’d ever thought about art school, maybe graphic design. I didn’t even know that was a real option. My guidance counselor, when I brought it up, told me flat out she couldn’t help me. She’d never had a single student go to art school.
There was a brief window before all of that where I thought maybe I’d be a marine biologist, back before I understood it meant labs and research instead of playing mermaids in reefs. But there I was, about to place what feels now like the first domino. Choosing art school.
The thing that made school easy and puzzles interesting was the same thing. The way I process things is different than “how you should process things”.
Constraints were never the enemy
I went to art school as a graphic design major and almost minored in printmaking. I loved letterpress and silk screen, the tactile part of it. I say “almost” because I was one credit away but because of scheduling/logistics I would have had to stay an extra semester to complete a required class and claim the actual degree. I decided the knowledge I had gained was enough and I didn’t need the title.
A painting teacher once told me I should switch majors and become a painter instead. I said no, I didn’t want to be a starving artist and at the time I believed that was the biggest reason for that choice.
I didn’t have anyone around me who’d actually built a life in fine art, so I had no evidence it was survivable. But honestly it was that I liked the problem solving of a brief more than I liked a blank page. Fine art hands you infinite possibility and asks you to say something and I didn’t think I had anything to say yet. Katie back then didn’t know that her experiences would give her LOTS to say later.
Design hands you a set of rules and asks what you can build inside them and that’s the part I couldn’t get enough of. Working the edges of a constraint until something beautiful and functional came out the other side.
Turns out I never wanted a blank page. I wanted a really good brief.
The methodology was the assignment
Senior year, my first web design class had one final brief: build a site about something you’d never done before. Everyone in the circle went with things like trying yoga or going vegetarian. Hobbies, lifestyle experiments.
I was last to go and I said I was going to sneak into VIP and meet Vanilla Ice.
The room looked at me like I was joking. I wasn’t. He had a meet and greet at a bar downtown and I was going to get into the roped off section and turn the whole thing into a repeatable framework other people could use.
Even back then, before I had a name for it, I was already doing what a psychic business strategist I got a reading from recently calls the Law of Assumption. Instead of chasing what you want, you assume it’s already yours.
I enlisted a friend, we got dressed up, waited in line, took photos with Vanilla Ice (he made an inappropriate comment about my cleavage, we ended up taking a second photo because he wanted more of it in frame, which tells you everything about that night) and stood near a Jäger ice luge while little people in oompa loompa costumes poured vanilla vodka into people’s mouths and threw pizza slices into the crowd. Don’t even get me started on how problematic this whole thing was. The VIP section had exactly two drink options, Heineken and Jäger, and I wasn’t dying to stay longer than the assignment required.
But I had a brief.
So my friend and I moved past Vanilla Ice, struck up a conversation with a girl who looked fab but approachable, and became instant, fast friends the way you do with a stranger in a bathroom line at 2 a.m. when someone needs a tampon and the whole room bands together.
Then a security guy started shouting
“If you don’t belong in VIP, move this way out of the area!”
And I thought → I DO belong here. So I hopped on the couch and kept talking to our new friend until things wound down. Met Vanilla Ice’s manager along the way, got offered a drink, Heineken again, and once the meet and greet ended and the bar started getting chaotic, we left.
Mission accomplished.
After, I built a methodology out of it. Four steps, I think, though I only remember the first one now: pretend like you belong there. The rest is buried on a hard drive somewhere with a cable that doesn’t fit anything I currently own. I built the site in Dreamweaver, turned in an HTML file, got an A.
That was the first time I went all the way through the loop. I had something I wanted. I figured out the strategy to get it. I turned that strategy into something repeatable and I published it for other people to use. The brief didn’t have to come from a client. I could hand it to myself.
Even a Vanilla Ice scheme can teach you how you build things.
Look for the evidence, not just the resume
None of this moves in a straight line. Marine biologist, then art school, then almost a painting major, then a Vanilla Ice website, then back to design as an actual living. But run it all through and it’s the same hand doing the sorting every time.
None of it registered as my actual wiring back then. It’s really only in the last five years that I’ve started seeing it and more keeps surfacing the longer I sit with it. If you want to understand how you operate, look for the evidence in your earlier years, before the external pressure got loud. Not what you were told to want. What you actually chose, and why, underneath the reasons you gave people at the time.
Here’s one more piece of evidence. I was a Girl Scout through ninth grade. My town was small enough that we shared a regional middle and high school, but somehow it had two separate troops.
One was about table settings, manners, cooking, sewing. Kind of a debutante in training vibe, even in Connecticut.
The other was camping, compasses, finding your way through the woods and it got more hardcore as I got older. Winter camping, lighting fires in the snow, a forty mile bike trip where we camped overnight, real hardcore shit.
I had picked the second troop. Obviously.
I chose the challenge. I chose to be in the wild. I chose the option where I would inevitably have to figure it the fuck out and the stakes were higher than seating arrangements.
The evidence is always there, in every chapter, if you go looking. The most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done isn’t any one accomplishment.
It’s finding these threads and choosing to build on them instead of around them. The more I know myself and choose myself, the less resistance I run into. Less drain. Less of the anger that shows up when I’m operating outside my own wiring instead of inside it. It’s a Manifestor thing. Mostly it’s just the difference between fighting your own pattern and finally building with it.
