On separating who you're told to be from who you really are

How did you get to where you are now?

Just by following what has been the most fun. I have a very low tolerance for anything that isn’t fun. I’m a big baby and that’s because I’ve always been self-employed. I have always just followed what is most enjoyable for me and also the most fulfilling. It’s led me to brand design, product design, clowning, stage combat, public speaking, teaching. I owned a co-working space, a comedy, mindfulness and meditation podcast. You name it, I’ve pursued it and done it because it was fun.

Do you feel like your process depends on the medium or do you have a one-size-fits-all approach?

I definitely have a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s very fun. I like to just think of my specialty and my niche as being my brain. I’m definitely a generalist in that sense. I like to leave all of the doors and windows open for possibilities, so I can go in any direction I want to. I’ve always just followed what’s really fun and it has always taken me in the most unexpected directions.

That’s a huge thing that comes across in your work—this idea of joy and play. What do you think is the importance of play, especially as adults and creatives?

It’s so important. The world turns us into a homogenous flattened society where most adults are just so beige and similar because it’s scary to be different and playful. When adults are playful and silly and nonsensical, it’s considered cringe.

When we’re kids, we make things without worrying about perfection or comparing ourselves to other people. We create things because it’s fun. As adults, we’ve sucked all the fun out of creativity and we create things because we have to, because we’re trying to survive in this world. So we end up just creating things for the sake of consumerism. There’s not much creativity in the way that is free because we’re all just trying to survive out here.

So it’s important to me to continue a practice of play and allow myself to experience that fully in my work and create at the speed of fun, which is making things before my brain can get in its own way. Play is so crucial to true creativity. It’s just so hard for us adults to get there.

How do you outrun your own anxieties?

I like to practice impulsivity as often as possible. If you’re not causing harm to yourself or others, it’s great to be impulsive. As soon as you think to do something, do it. It’s fun to do in a creative process no matter what your medium is. Just, “I have an idea, I’m going to try it without thinking about what the outcome will be, just to see what it feels like.”

Whenever I was training in a clown program, the homework would often be to do something “at the speed of fun,” which just means it’s faster than your inner critic.

So I really took to falling a lot. I would fall and that was my favorite thing to do. I got really good at just falling. I’d be out with my friends and then I’d just fall in the middle of the sidewalk. Another one is getting on an elevator that’s full of people and not turning around, just facing all the other people.

There’s so many things we do as adults that we just go along with because that’s what adults do, and you don’t have to. You don’t have to turn towards the door in an elevator. Making silly little choices every day impulsively retrains your brain to realize that it’s okay. It’s safe. The stakes aren’t as high as we make them seem.

What’s your training as a clown?

I’ve been clowning for a few years now. Intensives, different programs, multiple levels of programs at schools around New York City. I’m in deep. A lot of the stuff that I talk about in the design world is basically clown theory. I’m just repackaging it as creative play for adult creatives and non-creatives. But clown theory is all about this. It’s about being silly and being extremely vulnerable in front of other people and reacting to the audience in real time.

It’s a lesson in being more human and more vulnerable in front of other people, especially strangers, which is something we could all learn a little bit more of.

Clowning is a beautiful art form. It really speaks to me because my work is in play and joy and humanity and love, and that’s exactly what clown is: injecting the world with things the evil powers of the world don’t want us to feel. They want us to feel flattened; they don’t want us to feel love and humanity and joy and curiosity and play. And so clowning has taught me to bring that into my everyday life, but also my work. That way, I can be injecting the world with all of these things that truly do make the world a better place.

You’ve stated that your mission is “to make the world a happier place.” Can you tell me a little bit more about that mission?

When I was a kid, I remember learning about how the world works and being so confused. I was so confused about the concept of war and why we would kill people for a reason that I didn’t think was justified. And my teacher was just like, “Yeah, we’ve been doing this forever.” And I remember just thinking when I was a kid, “Wow, adults really don’t know what they’re doing. These people are idiots. When I’m an adult, I’ll fix it.”

So since I was a kid, I had this mission. That has always really driven me to work harder to make the world better. What I have is a loud voice and a captive audience and a creative brain, and so what I can do is utilize my personality and my skill sets to make the world better in the way that I uniquely can. That’s what I’m all about—trying to inject the world with all of those wonderful things and color and play and curiosity, and give boring, beige adults a sense of feeling the vibrancy and the uniqueness of celebrating themselves.

Have you heard from people who have interacted with your work and the effect that this mission has had on them?

Almost every adult I’ve ever met has had this issue where they don’t know how to separate the person they’ve been told they should be and the person who they actually are. We’re all just cosplaying as the version of ourselves we think people want us to be and it’s confusing to figure out the difference between that person and who we actually really have always been at our core. My favorite work is working with individuals to figure out what the expectations they’ve been putting on themselves or the world has been pressuring them to fit into, and how to let those things go. How to actually figure out who they’ve always been at their core and how to shout that out loud, as loud as possible, rather than being ashamed or feeling guilty about who they actually are.

It’s really gratifying to see someone finally feel seen by themselves for the first time. It’s really fun to watch people flourish and celebrate themselves.

It sounds like it’s very therapeutic.

Yeah, [laughs], I often feel like an unqualified therapist.

Oftentimes it just takes seeing someone live authentically in order to feel empowered to do the same thing. A huge part of your ethos is authenticity, which is why your work is so consistent, because it’s you. At our core, we are all just the same people as we were when we were children.

Exactly. My style was always coming out of me. Even when I was trying so hard to be someone else, I couldn’t escape my own style because my creative expression knew who I was even when I didn’t.

Now when trends come and go, or I’m inspired by somebody else’s work, I can look at it and appreciate it and not absorb it, not take it on as part of me now. I can let it go knowing that it’s perfect for someone else but not for me. It’s a relief… I don’t have to try and wear brown florals anymore; I love how they look on other people, and I know now that if I put one on myself, I’m going to feel terrible because nothing about me says brown floral dresses.

Yeah. When was that moment of shift? Do you remember that happening, of like, “Oh, man, I’ve been trying to emulate all these other people and then other people are perceiving my style before me.” Was it a noticeable shift at a certain point?

It was when I started to think back to when I was a kid and I started to ask myself, “What was I really into when I was a kid that I’m still into now?” For me, it was like clowns, circuses, mimes. I loved silent comedies, physical comedy, actors that were extremely physical. It made me realize, “Oh, maybe that’s why my work is always in this color palette of circus colors with black and white. Maybe that’s why I really like wearing black and white a lot, even though I love color.”

I’m loud and outgoing and extroverted sometimes but I’m also an extremely calm, even-keeled, introspective person. It’s important for me to also show both sides, the tension of those two things that have always existed in me in my work. I’m not ever going to be that person that’s going down the street wearing full bright color. I like to mix black and white and color because it really helps people to see both sides of me.

That’s the danger of putting someone in a box—everybody is always a bunch of contradictions, and there’s no such thing as being either/or. In a binary society, it can be easier to categorize and shortcut people in that way. Over the years, you’ve had this journey when it comes to being more comfortable with your body and your gender, so how has this identity formation and transition affected you and your creativity and your art?

Well, I am just a huge fan of questioning everything. Most people go their whole lives without questioning anything because it’s scary to start questioning things, and it leads to more questions and more questions and that can be very scary for some people.

Once I started questioning things, I was able to just ask myself, do I even agree with the gender I’ve been assigned? Do I even agree with the way that I’ve been dressing or the way that I view so many different topics? Questioning and thinking through things has been so empowering for me to have a more confident stance in general on who I am and why I’m in this way and the nuance of life. It’s been really important and powerful for me to not feel like I need to fit into any kind of binary.

That shows in my work as well. A lot of the work that I do is all centered around questioning things and asking myself, “Wait a minute, do I agree with that?” I do always encourage adults to constantly question the things that they think in their own brain and ask themselves if they even agree with the thought they just had, and that activity of practicing independent thought is so powerful but also very scary, and once you start doing it, it’s way easier to keep going.

I admire your optimism when it comes to the hellscape that we’re living in. When I think about it, it is hard not to get cynical because it does feel like the adults who don’t know what they’re doing are the ones who are the loudest and the ones who are winning. How do you retain hope? Is it because you’ve always known that it’s hell?

I’m glad you’re saying this now because literally just last week in therapy I had an epiphany about that, and if I didn’t have this epiphany, you may have just pointed it out to me now. But I think that I am able to remain so optimistic because I’ve always known this since I was a kid. Because people aren’t so used to questioning things, as the atrocity du jour comes to light, people are confronted with information that they haven’t had to think about before or haven’t let themselves think about before. So they’re all of a sudden becoming awake to an atrocity and rightfully very angry about it, and then the next atrocity happens. These are piling up, and so people are getting more cynical and more angry.

Like the first time one of my classmates told me what being gay meant and that it was bad, I was like, “But why?” It didn’t make any sense to my child brain. I was like, “That doesn’t make any sense.” So I was always really interested with learning more about what adults were getting wrong.

I never played with toys, I only thought. I loved to think the world’s deepest thoughts. So because I’ve always known all of this, I’ve developed into someone that can handle the nuance a little bit more than people that maybe are just now asking these questions. I’ve always been very comfortable understanding and believing that I do think this is a hellscape and we do live in hell, and I feel so empowered to do something about it.

It’s like another contradiction: We’re living in hell, but isn’t it awesome that we’re living at all?

There’s so much beauty, and I really, really enjoy things. I love to enjoy and I love to have fun, and this world is not fair and I also believe that the world is unfair. When you’re a kid, kids are always saying, “That’s not fair.” And the adults are always saying, “Well, life’s not fair.” And when I was a kid, I was like, “But that’s not okay. Life should be fair.” And fairness is definitely one of my top values, and I’m fighting tooth and nail to make sure that we live in a fair society in the way that I uniquely can fight.

That’s awesome. I think people definitely have a lot more power than they see themselves as having.

Absolutely. As creatives, we have the beautiful power that people look to us as the culture makers. We are the ones that people look to to determine what culture and society look, and that’s a huge source of power that I don’t want to waste. If people are looking to me at all, I’m going to say something important, I have to. That’s my chance. I think a lot of creative minds don’t realize how much power we wield. We wield power and it’s just crucial that we do what we can as creatives to help to shape the world into some kind of a brighter place.