I have refused to live

locked in the orderly house of

reasons and proof

~ Mary Oliver

The right hand edges of paragraphs in continuous texts form the most fascinating abstract patterns, but only if the paragraphs are aligned left and not ‘justified’. Nobody plans for these beautiful unpredictable edge lines (well, except poets) but everyone can paint them as long as they stop themselves from clicking on that control freak of a button so aptly named ‘justify’.

One of the things I find laughable about ‘stiff’ professions is their fear of reckless artistry. I’m an enthusiastic yet rebellious participant in one of these careers. That means I do use the justify button on word processors liberally. It speeds up readability when there are 400-page documents involved, which I find is quite often in my work.

It also means I make or notice art just as often. Like when I doodle all over my serious notes while looking at a poorly formatted document, take a break at the end of the day to come home to my knitting, then get back to working on the document and justify all its paragraphs all at once, but not before mentally tracing over the pretty edge lines I’m about to erase.

In the last few months since I changed all my work and personal device display settings to black, I’ve noticed lots of details I hadn’t seen before. I found a strange watermark on an official document that’s only visible in dark mode and I left it in because it makes me laugh.

I first changed my screens to see if it would help reduce the frequency of my ocular headaches, and now I’m staying in dark mode for the intrigue and for the speed at which I can now spot errors. A bit like making decisions that seem immediate and contained but finding that they have a ripple effect on your life in the most spectacular ways.

When I first started working, there was an even split among my peers, most of whom were wildly interesting, creative people. There were those who scoffed at the idea of rigid corporate jobs filled with stifling rules, politics and underwhelming salaries. Then there were those who stepped into work believing somehow that a job need not snuff out the big creative dreams of our youth or perhaps that somehow we’d be the exception, or maybe that having a steady income for a while might help fund our dreams.

Both groups were wrong in more ways than one.

In my case, I stumbled upon a world of work that was so interesting and intellectually dynamic that I no longer felt the sting of the things I’d given up by no longer being a creative among creatives. I took a series of big risks, hyperspecialising in a small niche long before I had the data points to see if it would be viable, choosing to be a black expatriate in a world and for a global employer that doesn’t believe in such a thing — we’re just black emigrant workers to them, never expatriates — and constantly taking on more than was reasonable for my situation.

These risks have paid off in more ways than I ever hoped for, and they’re still paying off. By rejecting the idea that I had to follow a single route if I went down the corporate path, I’ve seen and done more in 10 years of working than I thought I’d do in an entire career. That’s come at a cost, of course, including the fact that I stay on the periphery of most social and professional contexts because very few people can relate to the things I do, or even believe that’s what I do, really.

I hope to do it all over again for the next 10 years, only bolder this time and having more fun.

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