I Thought It Was for Other People

When I was in college, my dad pulled over outside Pixar. Not metaphorically, like actually pulled the car over in the middle of an errand while we were on the way to IKEA to buy furniture for my apartment. He pointed at THE GATES and said, completely seriously, “You should ask the security guard how to get a job here.”

I wanted to disappear. Because to me, Pixar wasn’t a place you could just casually walk up to. It was one of those impossible places you admire from very far, far, FAR away. You know, the kind you watch YouTube tours of at 2am and assume belongs to other people? Yep.

And for sooooome reason, my dad was treating it like we had just stopped for gas (🤦🏻‍♀️).

He made me get out of the car for a photo (a photo!?! I mean really 😭), and I remember standing there with my face fully red, thinking, Dad. Pleeeeeease STOP. These people do not want me here.

But at the exact same time, there was this ~other feeling~ underneath it. smaller, quieter, slightly AnnOyIng (AGH).

What if?

We got back in the car and continued to IKEA like nothing had happened, which honestly felt like the strangest part. I remember walking through those perfectly staged little rooms and thinking how strange it was that we could just move on… Like we hadn’t just stopped outside the thing I had spent years thinking about. Like that wasn’t a moment. I think I always assumed moments like that would feel bigger, more "obvious," like something would shift and you’d know THIS is it, this is the part where everything changes. And then we’d clip into a whole, beautiful 3-minute montage scene where I work my way to it, you know? But instead it was just parking lot, embarrassment, IKEA. And then, quietly, now what? (*sigh*)

For a while, nothing really did happen. There was no sudden burst of courage or dramatic follow-up where I marched back and asked someone how to get in; we just built my bed frame, debated rugs, ate meatballs, and had a completely normal IKEA day, except that the thought didn’t fully go away either. It just lingered in the most unhelpful way possible, not strong enough to act on, just persistent enough to interrupt me at random moments, like okay but… what if, followed immediately by NO, be serious, and then back to comparing desk options. I think that’s what I didn’t understand at the time, because I assumed that if something actually mattered, it would interrupt your life in a BIGGER WAY and come with some kind of clarity or direction, but instead it just sat there in the background while everything else kept moving.

And then somehow, later, I ended up there anyway, which still doesn’t fully make sense to me if I’m being honest, because I don’t think there was ever a clean moment where I suddenly felt like I had become the type of person who belonged. It wasn’t like that at all. It was more like I applied, and then I got it, and then I showed up, and the entire time I was kind of like… are we sure about this?? But the weirdest part wasn’t being there, it was realizing that nothing about the people felt the way I expected it to. I think I had built up this idea that everyone inside would feel fundamentally different, more certain or more confident or more chosen somehow, like there was a very clear reason they were there and a very clear reason I wasn’t supposed to be, but they weren’t like that at all. They were just people, people who cared a lot, like a LOT a lot, the kind of people who could spend an entire conversation talking about a single scene or a piece of music or why something emotionally worked or didn’t.

The other interns were like that, the teams were like that, and over the summer I’d plan these random little intern adventures … Six Flags, Pier 39, Taco Tuesday, Whiskey Wednesday, National Treasure night … together because I just LOVED being around them, We were bonding over animation in the exact slightly geeky, very earnest way I had always wanted to, and I remember thinking at some point, oh… this is it. Not Pixar as this big, impressive place, but this ~feeling~ of being around people who care this much about something, who love it enough to keep choosing it over and over again and want to make it better for the sake of making it better. And the strangest realization was that none of those people felt out of reach, because they weren’t a different type of human or part of some separate category of person who had been selected to be there, they were just people who had stayed close to what they loved long enough to build a life around it.

I felt that same thing again later, in a completely different setting, when I met Alex and spent time with the Kuku Studios team, and it was the same kind of energy, the same kind of conversations, the same willingness to go deep on things most people wouldn’t even notice. I could talk about listening to John Powell’s How to Train Your Dragon soundtrack an unreasonable number of times or why Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars is actually the best Star Wars content, and instead of feeling like I was doing too much, it just… landed. Like, oh, you’re one of us. And I think that’s when it really started to click that what I had been looking for this whole time wasn’t a specific place or title, it was this kind of energy, this kind of care, this kind of shared obsession with making something meaningful.

The funny thing is, even after finding that, it didn’t suddenly answer everything. If anything, it just shifted the question, because as soon as the internship ended, I found myself wondering what comes next in a completely different way.

• Do I stay in animation and try to build something here, or do I go find this same energy somewhere else?

• Do I chase a specific industry, or do I keep following the people who care this much about what they’re doing, wherever they are?

Because once you experience that kind of energy, it’s hard to unsee it, and it becomes less about getting into a particular place and more about finding your way into rooms where that feeling exists.

I think that’s the part I didn’t understand back in that parking lot, standing there convinced that this was for other people and not for me, because it was never really about getting past the gates in the way I thought it was. It was about realizing that the people on the other side of them were never as different as I made them out to be, and that maybe the distance I felt had less to do with them and more to do with what I believed about myself.

And the only reason that belief ever got interrupted in the first place was because my dad was willing to pull over, point at something I cared about, and say, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, you should go ask.