Rebecca had arrived at the firm five years ago with a portfolio of bold designs and a confidence that had impressed the senior partners enough to hire her despite her relative inexperience. Martin, the creative director, had taken a particular interest in her work from the beginning.
"You have raw talent," he told her in their first review. "Unrefined, of course, but promising. With the right guidance, you could develop into a solid designer."
She had been thrilled by his attention. Martin was respected in the field. His mentorship was a coveted advantage. His feedback, though often delivered with a slight edge, seemed valuable — evidence that he was invested in her development.
"This concept is interesting," he would say, examining her work. "A bit derivative of Jensen's work from the nineties, but that's to be expected at your stage. We all start by imitating before we find our voice." When colleagues praised her designs in meetings, Martin would nod thoughtfully. "Rebecca shows potential. She's still developing the technical rigour, but the instincts are there."
She had never questioned it. He was her mentor. His assessments were the lens through which she understood her own work. Promising. Developing. Still finding her voice. After five years, she was still finding her voice.
What about you?
Has someone's assessment of you ever become the main way you assessed yourself — without you noticing when that happened?
In a team meeting on a Tuesday afternoon, a junior designer presented a proposal — a residential complex with an unusual structural approach, something that bent the typical constraints of the brief into something entirely different. Bold. Almost reckless. The kind of thing that would either be brilliant or need significant revision.
Rebecca felt something shift in her chest as she looked at it.
Not admiration, exactly. Something older than admiration. Recognition.
That was what she used to do. That was how she used to think about a brief — not as a set of constraints to satisfy, but as a starting point to push against. She used to bring things into meetings that made people uncomfortable before they made them think. She had stopped doing that. She couldn't remember when. She just knew that at some point she had started designing to avoid Martin's qualifications, and somewhere in that process she had designed her own instincts out of herself.
After the meeting she sat at her desk for a while without opening anything.
Martin's voice had been in her head for so long it had started to sound like her own. Unrefined. Derivative. Promising but not yet. She had accepted those words as descriptions of reality rather than as one person's interpretation of her work — an interpretation that had served, she was now realising, to keep her cautious, to keep her checking with him, to keep her from arriving at the kind of certainty that no longer needed his permission.
She looked at the junior designer's proposal again, still open on her screen.
She remembered what it felt like to design like that.
What about you?
Have you ever caught a glimpse of who you used to be — or who you could have been — and felt the distance?