I’ve moved more times than most people can imagine. Yet one constant has always followed me.

A sleek black guitar bag.

Inside is a shortcut to instant admiration, a black-and-gold Gibson Les Paul. To others, it’s a dream instrument. To me, it’s a heavy time capsule. It holds a dull guilt for something I never mastered and a faint hope that I still might.

At seventeen, I crossed the ocean (again). I bought the Gibson in London as an emotional placeholder to ease the nostalgia. It was a bridge to the rocker boyfriend I’d left and the music scene where I felt I belonged. I wasn’t just buying wood and strings; I was buying an identity.

I practiced until I could almost get through a single piece. I lived in the aesthetic of being a guitarist. Then, without fanfare, graphic design appeared. I didn’t even know there was a name for what I was doing until an art teacher told me to look more closely at my sketches.

Before that, my track record was a series of abandoned starts: tennis and piano, to name a few. Everything was intense at first and then silently left behind. The Gibson became the physical symbol of all the versions of myself I almost became.

Maybe those short-term bursts of intensity are simply part of who I am. Even today, within design, I fall down rabbit holes, learning to code, experimenting with new tools, and chasing curiosity just to see where it leads.

Still, design didn’t work like the others.

It didn’t seduce me with a cool image or a leather-jacket persona. It wasn’t just getting ideas out of my head; it was getting them past other people. Sometimes it meant watching my “best” work go straight into the bin and revising without taking it personally. Somehow, that kept me hooked.

So the Gibson isn’t just an unused guitar in the corner of a room. It’s a map of the early days when I fell in love with the idea of who I might be before I did the harder work of learning who I actually am.

I’ve carried that heavy bag through every move across the globe. Maybe I’ll pick it up again next year.

Not to finally join a band, but to honour that seventeen-year-old girl in London who bought a dream she couldn’t yet carry, and to thank her for eventually leading me to the one thing that stayed.