Studio Note #71: Ithaca.

The long way back.

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When my old life collapsed, I identified with Gatsby.

There was a life I had built around art and design that I loved. Publications. A gallery. Articles. Celebrities passing through. Above all, artists I admired becoming people I knew. Work I was proud of.

And then, relatively quickly, it was gone. 17 years passed through my hands like sand at high tide. I did everything I could to save it.

For a long time, I think some part of me wanted to get back to it.

Not necessarily the gallery or the publication, but that version of myself. The person who was doing meaningful creative work and somehow kept finding himself in rooms with people he admired.

Gatsby made sense to me then.

The belief that somewhere out there was a version of the past you could recover if you could just find your way back to it.

I don't identify with Gatsby anymore.

I think about Odysseus.

His story isn't about recreating what he had. It's about the long, strange and often completely unexpected journey home.

This weekend, through a completely chance encounter, I met Bill Gardner.

Bill is the founder of LogoLounge and someone whose work has been part of the design world for decades. Twenty-five years ago, he was exactly the kind of person I would have been thrilled to meet as a young designer.

We talked about design, the strange paths careers take and the work we're both doing now. We exchanged cards.

There was no conference.

No gallery opening.

No carefully engineered networking opportunity.

Just an incredibly unlikely crossing of paths.

And somewhere in that conversation, I realized something.

For a long time, I thought getting my life back meant finding my way to where I'd been.

It didn't.

The route went through places I never would have chosen and took considerably longer than I would have liked.

But I'm making work again.

I'm building something again.

I found love again.

I'm meeting people who inspire me again.

I'm not trying to get back to the life I had.

I'm starting to realize I've just found my way home.