By Design

There's a moment in a well-designed space when you exhale.

Sometimes it's the light. The proportion. The texture of an old material against something new. Sometimes it's simply the absence of something that never needed to be there.

I've become increasingly interested in that feeling—not only in the spaces I design, but in the way we inhabit our lives.

Over the past few years, mine began to feel strangely out of balance.

Nothing was obviously wrong. The foundation was good. I had built a life around people and things I deeply valued. And yet, somewhere along the way, I realized I had become very good at making room for everyone else while taking up remarkably little space myself.

My instinct, at first, was to think something had gone terribly wrong.

What I eventually discovered was much more interesting:

The foundation didn't need replacing. The composition needed reconsidering.

Keep the History. Move the Walls.

In interior design, we don't have to erase everything that came before in order to create something new.

History gives a space character. Materials acquire depth with time. The question becomes: What still belongs?

Sometimes, a wall that once made sense no longer supports the way people live today. And sometimes, after treating that wall as immovable for years, you discover something rather liberating:

It wasn't load-bearing after all.

I've had a few of those walls in my own life.

Old expectations. Ideas about who I needed to be. The tendency to manage outcomes rather than allowing other people their own experiences. Even assumptions I'd made about myself.

Some were worth preserving.

Others weren't structural at all.

Learning to distinguish between the two has been its own kind of design process.

Making Room for Myself

Interior design entered my life at exactly the right time.

I expected to learn about color, materials, history, space, and composition. I didn't expect design to give me a language for understanding myself.

But as I learned to trust my instincts creatively, something else began happening.

I became more willing to have an opinion.

More comfortable being seen.

More curious.

More open to inspiration.

And perhaps most importantly, I stopped believing that making space for myself somehow took space away from someone else.

The opposite happened.

As I became more fulfilled, the people around me seemed to have more room to breathe, too.

There was space for every story.

Including mine.

Finding My Voice

Eventually, those ideas found their way somewhere I never expected: into a song.

I had begun taking voice lessons, partly because I wanted to improve my singing. But learning to use my voice became another exercise in allowing myself to be heard.

When I began writing By Design, I naturally used the language I knew from interiors—light, composition, materials, history, and breathing room.

But as the song developed, I began to recognize my own life inside the metaphor.

The walls weren't load-bearing after all.

There was room for my story, too.

And what remained was there by design.

Suddenly, a song inspired by the way I see interiors had become something much more personal.

Showing Up Before You Feel Ready

Recently, I've found myself stepping into opportunities I wouldn't have imagined a few years ago—building my design practice, placing in a design competition, sharing my work publicly, writing, meeting people in the design community, and, eventually, sitting down for an interview with Influential Women.

That last one still makes me smile.

Not because I suddenly began thinking of myself as an "influential woman," but because I was learning something important:

I don't have to decide ahead of time how other people will see me—or how much space I'm allowed to occupy.

Whether a title fits is someone else's decision.

Mine is simply to show up.

And maybe that is why I wanted to share this story here.

There may be another woman who has spent years making room for everyone around her and has begun wondering whether there is still room for something that belongs only to her—a creative idea, a new career, a voice she hasn't used in a while, or simply a part of herself she would like to know again.

Making room for that doesn't require tearing down everything you've built.

You can honor your history without being confined by it.

You can love the life you've created and still change its composition.

You can discover that something you thought was structural was only a wall.

Some things are worth preserving.

Some walls can move.

And there is room for your story, too.

What remains?

By design.

Listen to By Design