Jesse Lives! - Pg. 9

what I hated more than anything else was identifying myself as a scientist. Every time that inevitable question came up, I cringed. If I admitted I was a scientist, a research scientist, a biochemist, two things happened.
 
First, the person that I was talking to labeled me with every stereotype he or she held regarding scientists, thus reaching several false conclusions regarding what sort of person I was. (This often resulted in some sort of stilted conversation regarding the area of my research in which neither of us was really very interested.)
 
Second, even though it was true, I was a scientist, and I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to come to New York if I hadn’t been, I felt like a liar. This was a corrulary of the first effect. I felt I’d just claimed to be a whole lot of things I wasn’t, and at the same time, I felt like I’d betrayed myself in passing up a chance to claim a single thing I really was (or wanted to be).
 
So what was it that I wanted to be able to claim to be? (Oh, the irony!) A designer. Yes, the same person who didn’t have the nerve to state a design opinion in the presence of a “real designer” wanted to be one. You may say “Yes, and I want to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but that’s not going to happen,” and you’d be right. But you’d be wrong as well, because I already was a designer. That was another thing I didn’t know yet.
 
I can just hear you saying to yourself “Oh yeah, I bet she fit right in among all those other mildly insane folks she’s been jabbering on about.” I can’t blame you, unless perhaps you’re a designer, too. Perhaps you don’t know it?

Let me convince you. (Of course, I never would have had the nerve to say any of this to you had we actually met, but I’m very convincing when I’m talking to imaginary folks.) “A designer designs,” I would say, sagely.