At a wedding, someone asks what you do. “Designer,” you say. It is true, and it helps the conversation along. You don’t mention the choir on Monday evenings, the quilt you made from your mother’s old clothes, or the fact that you can tell by your father’s “hello” whether he needs help with his phone or simply wants to hear your voice. A stranger hasn’t asked for the whole inventory. There is cake to cut.
By the time you meet his partner, you have become “the designer.” The label has made a small journey without you. It has not lied. It has just travelled with less of you than you brought.
You can put the name tag down for a moment, honey. I’m Camilla Wellton. At the wedding, I want you to hear the part of your answer you swallowed. I know the convenience of a job title. I’m a fashion designer, an author, a mother, and a founder; each description is true, and none is a complete person. You needn’t recite a résumé to a stranger holding a glass of wine. Still, when the same part of you is edited out every time, the omission can begin to feel like a rule about who you’re allowed to be. Let’s look at that rule together.
Perhaps your work is genuinely central to you. I would never ask a person to diminish a vocation in the name of being well rounded. A dancer may know herself most deeply while moving. A nurse may love the particular intelligence of care. A designer can spend an entire life asking what a body needs from a garment. The problem is not devotion. It is the idea that devotion to one thing makes everything else a decorative hobby.
The choir is not a secret audition for a second career. You sing with people who sometimes arrive tired and leave able to laugh. Once you enter too early, and a woman beside you loses her place because she is laughing. You stay. The hour has been worth having even though nobody records it. The quilt did not need a buyer. It changed the way you could sit with a loss. Your father may never learn every feature on that phone, but he knows whom he can call when the screen frightens him. None of these experiences becomes more real if you can put it on a résumé.
One of the books in my Sensual Hero’s Journey is All of Me. I wrote it for moments when we are tempted to choose a single acceptable version of ourselves. The title isn’t a request to tell strangers every private fact. It is an invitation to let your different parts remain in conversation with one another. What does the singer know about listening that the designer can use? What does the maker of the quilt know about patience? More importantly, can the singer have an hour of her own without being recruited to improve the designer’s work?
That last question matters. We have become skilled at describing every pleasure as an investment. Singing improves focus. Walking generates ideas. Rest boosts productivity. These claims may sometimes be true, but I feel a little tired just writing them. A person can sing because singing is beautiful. A walk can belong to the walker rather than to the next project. If the only way to defend joy is to prove that it will make us more efficient, we have already let efficiency decide what a life is for.
Of course, if you need money, an interest may become paid work. I am a fashion designer and an author. I know that a thing you love can also be a thing that supports a household. “Never monetise your joy” is easy advice from someone else’s comfortable chair. The useful question is whether you are choosing the exchange with open eyes. Do you want the choir to become a paid performance, with rehearsals, invoices and expectations? You might. Or you might need Monday to remain the evening when nobody asks what your voice is worth.
Pleasure Is My Medicine, another book in that series, asks what it is like to receive pleasure without immediately making it justify itself. Its question belongs beside the choir. You could practise after the rehearsal by letting the hour count as an hour you lived, rather than converting it into a lesson you can report. What did you hear? Where did your shoulders settle? Whose laughter stayed with you on the way home? There may be no outcome to announce. Something good happened anyway.
Sometimes a role does more than occupy your calendar; it shapes the evidence you accept about yourself. A stranger forgets that you sing, and you start to speak as if singing were incidental. A parent remembers only your practical reliability, and you become the person who never asks for help. A friend calls you the adventurous one, and the day you want to stay home feels like a breach of contract. Roles help other people find us. They can also make it harder for us to notice that we have changed.
This is where I turn to Reality Revealed, the card deck and companion book I made for examining the stories through which we interpret our lives. If you catch yourself saying, “I’m only valuable when I make something useful,” try asking which events taught you that sentence. Did someone praise your work and overlook your company? Did you grow up where everyone’s labour was needed? These are real experiences. The conclusion you drew from them may have helped you belong. But it is still a conclusion, and you are allowed to ask whether it describes your life now.
Not everybody gets to choose the label by which a room knows them. A Black or brown woman in a Nordic creative space may be introduced as a representative of a community before she is introduced as an artist. A parent may be treated as a parent in every room, even when she has come to speak about architecture. A head covering, a wheelchair, an accent, a surname can enter ahead of the person. Correcting every introduction is exhausting, and silence is not consent to be reduced. Sometimes the room should do more work.
At Krull, an Encyclopedia of Fashion Designers can begin with dates, places and garments while still leaving room for each maker’s particular imagination. The entries cannot contain entire lives, of course. No entry can. The editorial responsibility is to make a beginning rather than a box. You can meet a designer through her clothes and then remain curious about the person who made them.
Back at the wedding, you do not need to turn your answer into a speech. “Designer” may be enough for this conversation. You might add, “and I sing on Mondays,” if the stranger seems interested. You might ask him what brought him here. The freedom lies in remembering that the short answer is yours to use. You can open it a little or leave it closed. You need not leave the choir, the quilt, or your father outside the room in order to eat a piece of cake.
