Leaving a Trail

Only a few years into my career, I had carved out more opportunities than I ever expected. I'd been published in industry magazines, featured in the national press, invited to speak on stages I never imagined and watched a couple of side projects take on lives of their own. From the outside, everything looked good.

The truth is, I never particularly enjoyed being visible. I was always happiest on the periphery, sharing work, getting feedback from my small group of friends, then retreating back to my desk to keep iterating. That preference always felt slightly at odds with being a designer, but for a while, it worked. I managed to do the work while keeping a comfortable distance from the attention it attracted. Until there was a moment where that distance collapsed.

In early 2013, three months into my time at Foursquare, I launched my first project: mobile touch pages. In the context of the company, it was a blip on the radar. But watching usage data climb far beyond anything I'd worked on before made something unavoidably clear. The work I was doing was no longer something I could quietly develop in isolation. It was being experienced, judged, and discussed at scale.

If I struggled to sit with my own work long enough to evaluate it objectively, I had no idea how to cope with what others thought of it. The irony is that structured feedback was never the problem. I learned early on how to sit in a critique, how to separate my ego from the work, how to push back on weak reasoning while staying open to legitimate concerns. Design reviews and executive presentations never rattled me. What destabilised me was everything that came after launch: the Reddit threads, the Twitter takes, the secondhand reports of what people were saying. It wasn't feedback I could engage with. It was just noise. And I didn't know how to filter it.

With each project that followed, I became more deliberate about staying out of view. I made sure that outside of the company there was no paper trail back to me. No avatar in the mocks, no username in the UI, no mention of myself in the accompanying blog post heralding the release of said feature that others clamoured for.

What started as self-protection slowly hardened into a set of rules to live by and eventually those rules found their way onto this website. One day I decided to strip everything back to a single, banal one-page site. Everything I'd ever hit publish on was gone. All I had to do was open my FTP client, select all, and hit delete.

That was 2014, and unfortunately, it remained this way for longer than I'd like to admit.

What I didn't understand at the time was the cost of that retreat.

Writing had always been how I processed my thoughts, from revising for exams to sketching ideas in wireframes. Getting things out of my head and onto a page helped me see them more clearly, organise them, challenge them. Without that outlet, thoughts piled up. Ideas stayed half-formed. Observations went unexamined. There's something cumulative about writing. The more I did it, the sharper I felt. When I stopped, atrophy set in and over time, disappearing stopped feeling like a reaction and started to feel like a default.

We build things for a digital world where very little sticks around. Products are replaced, interfaces rewritten, features deprecated. Some of the things we make matter to people for a moment, sometimes longer, but without preservation they vanish. Not having any trace of that—for myself, or for anyone else who might have cared—stopped sitting right with me.

There was another cost too, one that took longer to see. I don't know what opportunities I lost by disappearing. I can't measure what didn't happen. But I started noticing the patterns around me: people getting promoted, changing jobs, being approached for opportunities they never applied for. Meanwhile, I'd gone silent at the exact moment my career was gaining momentum. Where might I be now if I'd kept going? It's impossible to know, and probably unwise to dwell on, but the question lingered.

Here's the strange part: I'd never had trouble advocating for other people. When a junior designer's work deserved recognition, I made sure the right people saw it. When a colleague needed visibility for a project, I'd happily write the blog post, make the introduction, put their name forward. There was no discomfort there at all. It was only when the spotlight turned towards me that I wanted to step back.

I spent years trying to understand that asymmetry, why championing others felt natural while championing myself felt like performance. Eventually, I realised it came down to intent. When I advocated for someone else, it was about the work. When I thought about promoting myself, it felt like something else entirely. Like I was asking to be seen for the sake of being seen.

After I'd already stripped things back and learned to stay quiet, I started to see the consequences of that choice, especially after moving to the US. If you don't vouch for yourself in some way, no one else will. I don't love that reality, but it exists. Championing yourself doesn't have to mean shouting. Sometimes it just means leaving something behind. And for a long, long time, I hadn't done that.

The shift, when it came, wasn't a single moment. It was a slow accumulation of realisations. Watching people around me move forward while I stayed still. Noticing that by erasing everything, I'd made it harder to connect dots in my own career—to show progression, to reference past solutions, to build on what I'd learned. Recognising that the discomfort I'd been avoiding hadn't gone away, it had just calcified into something harder to shift.

I learned to distinguish between being visible—which is unavoidable when you ship work people use—and performing visibility, which is optional. I could present work, defend design decisions, advocate for ideas. None of that drained me. What did was the other kind: the constant cultivating of personal brand, the strategic posting, the networking for visibility's sake. The feeling that if you're not regularly reminding people you exist, you'll be forgotten.

A mentor once told me: "You are not your work." It took years to understand what that meant. The work can be critiqued, torn apart, misunderstood, or ignored, and none of that diminishes you. But it also means the work deserves to exist independently. And for a long time, by erasing myself, I'd erased it too.

Time helped. Distance from the worst of the discomfort helped more. As I got older, some of what felt insurmountable started to feel manageable. The losses I'd experienced—personal ones that put professional anxieties in perspective—made it easier to see how small the stakes actually were. I'd convinced myself that being visible was dangerous. But I'd lived through things that were actually hard. This wasn't that.

I've learned where my boundaries are now. I write when I have something to work through. I document projects once they're done. I try and stay away from places that feel performative.

Slowly, the idea of rebuilding started to feel less like exposure and more like reclamation. Not all at once. Not with a grand plan. Just a quiet sense that it was time.

Rebuilding this site isn't about fixing what was "broken". It's about giving myself something to work with again. Technology has moved on, and so have I. Websites were where I started and they're still how I learn. I like going down rabbit holes, experimenting, building things just to see if I can. Starting again felt cathartic. The shackles were off. I could decide what to bring forward, what to archive, what to leave behind. Everything I've ever written is still here, most of it just under the hood.

I didn't have a vision for what the site should look like. The only rule was that it had to be unapologetically me. Not perfect. Not finished. Just stripped back and modular enough to grow into whatever it needs to become.

That's why some of the parts I'm most proud of aren't especially impressive. They're just honest. A catalogue of books that shaped how I think. Every concert ticket I ever kept (I kept them all), scanned and archived from a medium that no longer exists. A map of every check-in I made during my time at Foursquare, now preserved as a quiet snapshot of movement across cities and years. There are other pages too—small, personal things—that might never make sense to anyone else. They don't need to.

For a long time, I convinced myself there was only one way to write here. That this had to be a technology blog. A design blog. A place to market my own personal "brand". It was a self-imposed rule, and a ridiculous one. Years and years ago I even considered splitting my writing in two, one public and one hidden, as if my life needed separate streams. Deep down, I think I always knew it should just be one.

In the years I didn't write, I moved countries. I learned how to navigate new cities, new systems, new ways of living. I lost my mother. I watched my sister get married and become a parent. I went through major surgery during COVID. I developed alopecia universalis and felt the quiet mental toll that came, and continues to come, with it. All of that mattered. All of it deserved acknowledgement.

I used to think writing here meant having something profound to say. Now I realise the most useful things I've read were the ones where someone just documented what they tried, what worked, what didn't. For me, the process matters more than the polish. If someone reads about a design decision I made and it helps them think through their own problem differently, that's worth something.

I'm not chasing a version of success that was never really mine anymore. I'm not trying to impress anyone here. I don't need this site to be widely respected. I just need it to exist. I'll write here now because it helps me think, not because I'm building an audience. I'll document work because it deserves somewhere to live, not because I'm chasing visibility.

The difference is small but it changes everything.

If I keep writing here for the next five years, I want it to be a log, not a highlight reel. Something that shows where I was, what I cared about, how I saw the world at the time. A body of work that exists because the work mattered.

If this post ends on anything, I hope it's permission. Permission to stop comparing. Permission to take up space quietly. Permission to stay. If you can't be free on your own domain, on a website you own and control, then I don't know where you can be.

I disappeared once. I don't plan on doing it again.

• Location: Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
• Mood: Anxious
• Song: Death in Vegas - Scorpio Rising