Seven Versions of Me Live in My Junk Drawer

I was looking for a AA battery last Sunday when I found her: a glossy business card with a minimalist logo, a teal accent stripe, and the words Salt & Serif Design Co. printed in a font I agonized over for weeks. The phone number was my old one. The email no longer exists. The company itself? It never launched. Not one paying client, not one invoice, not one meeting that ended with a handshake.

I stood in front of the junk drawer for a long time, holding a business card for a designer I never became.

The Drawer That Time Forgot

If you've lived in the same apartment long enough, you have one of these drawers too. Ours holds dead batteries, rubber bands from broccoli crowns, takeout menus from restaurants that closed during the pandemic, and — apparently — an archaeological record of my creative career.

Under Salt & Serif, I found a laminated conference badge from 2019. Anjali Tyagi, Freelance Content Strategist. I remember that badge. I wore it for three days in Chicago, went to exactly one panel, and spent the rest of the conference in the hotel lobby talking to a woman who ran a tattoo parlor in Portland about why we both hated the word "synergy."

Below that, folded in half, a certificate of completion from a two-day letterpress workshop I took in 2017. I have no memory of the instructor's name. I remember the smell of the ink, though — like tar and old books — and how my arms ached for two days after cranking the press.

And at the very bottom, half-stuck to the drawer itself, a sticky note in my own handwriting: "MFA apps?? Due Jan 15??" The question marks are doing a lot of work there. I did not apply that January. Or the next one.

The People I Almost Became

Here's what nobody tells you about the paths you don't take: they don't disappear. They just move into your junk drawer.

Salt & Serif was going to be the version of me who had it together. Clean logo, clean brand, a business plan I wrote in a Moleskine notebook at a coffee shop in Logan Square. That version of me answered emails within the hour and had a filing system. She lasted about four months before I realized I was more in love with the idea of being a designer than the actual work of designing for clients who wanted their logo bigger.

The freelancer with the laminated badge — she was real, and she was tired. She invoiced through a platform that took a cut, chased three clients for payment, and once wrote 4,000 words about commercial HVAC systems for a website that went under before publishing them. But she also learned how to write on deadline, how to kill her darlings without flinching, how to ask the follow-up question in an interview. Every skill she built is load-bearing in the writing I do now.

And the letterpress woman? She's the reason I still care about how words look on a page. Why I'll spend twenty minutes choosing a typeface for this website. Why a well-set paragraph gives me the same pleasure as a well-made cocktail.

What the Abandoned Versions Left Behind

I used to think of these artifacts as tombstones. Evidence of failure. Little glossy rectangles of quitter.

I've changed my mind. I think they're more like compost.

The design studio that never launched taught me everything I know about visual identity — which is why this site looks the way it does, why I care about white space, why I refuse to use stock fonts that feel like a dentist's waiting room. The freelance years taught me discipline and humility and how to write about HVAC with a straight face. The letterpress workshop taught me patience, and that handmade things carry the marks of the hands that made them.

The MFA I didn't pursue? The sticky note is still in the drawer. But the writing life I built instead — the wandering, the essays, the strange little stories on this site — couldn't have come from an MFA. It came from taking the scenic route. From every detour and dead end and drawer full of almosts.

Keep the Card

So here's my advice, for whatever it's worth: don't throw out the business cards for the lives you didn't live. Keep the badge. Keep the certificate, even if you can't remember the instructor's name.

Not as a reminder of what you failed to become — but as a receipt for the raw material. Every abandoned identity contributed something. The designer gave you the eye. The freelancer gave you the spine. The letterpress student gave you the patience. The unapplied MFA gave you the freedom to write weird.

I found my battery eventually, by the way. It was in the kitchen junk drawer, under a stack of Salt & Serif cards I'd forgotten I'd ordered fifty of.

I kept them all. Someone's got to remember who I almost was.