Auteur Cuisine: Today's Spaghetti, Fifty Pixels Wide

Dough already made, I decided those noodles were going to be as precise as if I'd used a pasta machine. Spaghetti, fifty pixels wide. I gave it a fancy name afterward: the foodie crowd would call this "Auteur Cuisine", improvising with whatever's on hand. No rolling pin, an empty vermouth bottle instead. No pasta machine, a design cutting mat and a box cutter instead. The point was: I have nothing, and I'm still getting there. Will it take longer? Probably. Am I up for the ride? Also yes.

The same cutting mat I use for work, dusted in flour and crooked noodles today.

Nobody assigned me this. No client, no brief, no research phase. Just me, a craving for pasta, the bottle, the mat, and the box cutter. I already had everything I needed: the what and the how.

They came out crooked, every single one, but the goal was never a clean result. It was working around obstacles to eat homemade noodles. Delivery could've gotten me the same thing, probably faster. But my plate tasted like a personal win.

When I worked for someone else, the brief was never mine to shape. I gave nine to six, full time and full headspace, to goals that weren't mine. And that's fine, that's how it works. But when the focus started shifting, when I caught myself thinking about my own time, an automatic response kept hitting snooze: "I'll think about it later." What that really meant was I didn't have a brief of my own to answer to yet.

Rollback a year and change: before I left corporate life behind, I'd started digging into this with a coach. That's when it clicked that this wasn't a project decision, the kind with a deadline and a close-out. It was a life decision. Who do I want to be. What do I want to do. The coach didn't teach me how to decide. He showed me that decision had been waiting a lot longer than I'd been giving it.

Because to paint a wall the color you actually want, you need to build it first, and for that you need a blueprint. That blueprint was, for the first time, a brief I wrote for myself, with a few more coaching sessions thrown in. That's the ride I've been cutting my own path through ever since, with whatever tools I've got on hand, the what and the how pinned to the horizon.

J.