The year started as something I had to navigate around. A health situation, an independent study arrangement, a pivot away from the structure of a regular school schedule. I’m not going to dramatize it — it was disruptive and frustrating and not what I would have chosen.
But then something unexpected happened: I had time.
I started with 3D printing because a friend had a printer and I got curious. I designed a small bracket for something, printed it, watched it fail, revised the design, printed it again. The iterative loop of design → build → evaluate → improve was immediately addictive. It’s the same loop I’d learned in investing — form a thesis, test it, update based on what you observe.
I went deeper. I learned Fusion 360 for proper CAD. I started designing things I actually wanted to exist — including a spoiler shelf that I designed completely from scratch, printed in sections, and vinyl-wrapped myself. When I was done, it looked like a product. Something manufacturable. That feeling — of having imagined a thing and then made it real — is a specific kind of satisfaction I hadn’t found in any other domain.
Then came the resin table.
A resin table is a weeks-long project. You’re not pouring once and watching it set. You’re managing cure times, layering, sanding through ascending grits, watching for bubbles, correcting imperfections as they emerge. It requires the kind of patience that doesn’t come naturally to me — but which I’ve learned to cultivate deliberately, partly through markets, partly through cooking, partly through just getting old enough to have seen that rushing almost always costs more time than it saves.
The finished table sits in my room. I look at it and see every decision I made — the ones that worked and the ones I had to work around.
I also spent that year going deep on the Adobe suite. Photoshop first, then Lightroom, then Premiere. Then After Effects, Illustrator, audio work. I wasn’t taking a class — I was watching tutorials until I understood the underlying principles, then going off-tutorial and learning by trying.
This is the pattern, I’ve come to understand: I learn best by choosing to care deeply about something and then refusing to stop until I understand it. ADHD gets framed as a deficit of attention. That’s not quite right, in my experience. It’s more like attention that’s selective — when something captures it, the intensity is hard to describe from the outside.
The year I was supposed to be off-track turned out to be the year I built most of what I actually know how to do.
I came back to school as Lead Studio Director. I don’t think that would have happened on the same timeline if I’d followed the standard path. The year that looked like a detour turned out to be the year I got miles ahead.
That’s not a lesson I can apply prescriptively to anything else — I’m not recommending disruption as a strategy. But it taught me something about optionality: that time spent building real skills, even in unconventional circumstances, is never actually lost.
The resin table is still in my room. I should probably photograph it properly. Every time I see it I think: I made that. That’s still enough.