People like tidy labels. Designer. Musician. Strategist. Writer. One word. One lane. Something easy to file you under.
I’ve never fit comfortably inside one word. And for a long time that felt like a problem I needed to solve. Especially when it came to my brand. I kept circling the same questions.
Should I separate everything? Should the music live over here and the design over there? Will people understand me, or just feel confused?
I tried different versions of the split. At one point, my design work lived under a studio name and my music lived under me. It made sense on paper. In practice, it felt like constantly changing clothes between rooms. The work didn’t feel separate. Only the structure did.
When you do more than one thing, the instinct is often to divide. Keep it neat. Keep it targeted. But splitting your work can start to split your voice.
Your energy gets divided. Your attention gets pulled in different directions. And the person at the centre of it all, you, ends up feeling oddly absent from your own brand.
What I’ve learned is this: people don’t need you to be simpler. They need to understand the thread that runs through everything.
For me, that thread is clarity. Whether I’m designing a brand, writing a song, or putting words on a page like this, I’m doing the same thing in different forms. Trying to make something internal feel visible. Trying to help someone recognise themselves more clearly. The outputs change. The source doesn’t.
Once I stopped trying to force my work into separate identities and let it live under one creative world, things felt lighter. Less costume change. More continuity. Not because I merged everything into one offer, I didn’t. The structure still exists. The pathways are clear. But they’re all part of the same landscape. It feels closer to the truth of how I actually work.
I think the discomfort of doing more than one thing often comes from how we think other people see us. We worry it looks messy. Unfocused. Too much. But most of the time, the issue isn’t the range. It’s the lack of a visible through-line. Once that’s clear, the variety stops looking scattered and starts to look dimensional.
You don’t have to compress yourself into one label to be understood. You just need to know what connects the pieces, and let that lead. Everything else can arrange itself around that.
You can be more than one thing. You’re still one person.