I Thought Creative Lives Were for Other People

When I was in college, my dad pulled over outside Pixar Animation Studios.

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 real place. It was one of those impossible places you admire from very, very, VERY far away. You know … the kind you watch YouTube tours of at 2am and assume belongs to other people. You know, those places where everyone inside seems fundamentally different from you somehow. More talented. More certain. More chosen.

Meanwhile my dad was treating it like we had just stopped for gas. He made me get out of the car for a photo and I remember standing there with my face fully red thinking, Dad. Pleeeease STOP. These people do not want me here.

But underneath the embarrassment was this quieter feeling I didn’t really know what to do with at the time.

…what if?

We got back in the car and continued to IKEA like nothing had happened, which honestly felt like the strangest part. We just went back to debating desks and eating meatballs while my brain quietly kept circling this feeling I couldn’t fully articulate yet. I think I always assumed moments that matter would feel BIGGER somehow. Like there would be swelling movie music and sudden clarity and a montage sequence where everything in your life starts making sense.

Instead it was just: parking lot. embarrassment. IKEA.

And then quietly:

now what?

For a long time, the answer was basically… well … nothing.

Not because I stopped caring, but because I think I had already internalized this idea that creativity belonged to OTHER people. Not in some dramatic way either. I still loved creative things. I obsessed over films and music and storytelling and animation. I was the kind of person who could listen to the How to Train Your Dragon soundtrack on repeat and genuinely feel emotionally altered by it. (Thank you John Powell.) I could also spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about why Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars is some of the best Star Wars storytelling. 

I loved people who cared deeply about making things. I just didn’t fully think I could ever be one of them.

Or maybe more accurately, I thought those lives existed in a separate category from “real life.” Creativity was something you admired from a distance while practical people pursued employable things. But somehow, no matter what environment I was in, I always felt most energized around people who were obsessively making things.

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Then eventually, somehow, I ended up at Pixar anyway. 

And honestly, one of the most surprising parts wasn’t even the work itself. It was the PEOPLE.

Because I had never really been in rooms like that before. Rooms where you could openly nerd out about the things you loved and instead of people subtly judging you and saying “that’s nice dear that you still like cartoons …” or trying to sound cooler than they actually were, they would lean in further. You’d ask someone how they came up with a certain story idea or visual choice and suddenly they’d light up explaining some tiny emotional detail they had spent YEARS thinking about because they genuinely cared that much about getting it right.

One of the strangest things about animation people is that asking more questions actually makes the conversation BETTER. 

I remember being at an animation premiere once talking to the guy next to me about how everyone at Berkeley studies computer science and joking, “LOL I mean… so basic right?”

And he goes:

“I studied CS.”

He was the Chief Technology Officer at Pixar.

.

.

.

🫠

Which honestly. Incredible work by me there (🤦🏻‍♀️). I remember immediately feeling like I had completely bombed the interaction, but instead of getting weird about it, he just started talking about the work itself. Not prestige. Not status. The actual WORK.

We ended up having this whole conversation about how people build new technology every day, but what mattered to him was helping create stories that people would remember forever. Stories like Up, Monsters, Inc., and Inside Out. Technology in service of emotion. Infrastructure in service of story.

And I remember standing there thinking:

Oh. THIS is what I’m actually drawn to.

Not just impressive careers or ambitious people or cool companies. I think what I’m really drawn to is being around people who care so deeply about something that they continue building their lives around it.

Recently, I flew into LA for a business trip and ended up meeting some old Pixar intern friends for brunch.

Which honestly still feels surreal to say out loud because somehow we’re all real adults now with actual jobs scattered across the industry. Walt Disney Animation Studios, Nickelodeon, DreamWorks Animation, Netflix … you name it. (The professionally trained hoop jumper in me would like you to know the flagship names, apparently 😅.)

But honestly, what stayed with me had nothing to do with the companies. 

It was the feeling.

Because for the first time in a long time, I got to talk about animation again in that very specific overly intense way animation people do. We started talking about stories in production, styles they were testing, fun side projects outside of work, and suddenly two hours disappeared without anyone trying to sound cool or detached about caring deeply.

And somewhere in the middle of brunch, I realized:

oh.

this feels like home.

Which hit me especially hard because right before that trip, I had been on a Zoom call with someone telling me, “You’ll find your people.”

At the time, I remember nodding politely while internally thinking, okay but WHERE are these ~mysterious~ people exactly 😭. But sitting there at brunch, I finally understood what she meant. I had taken that feeling for granted during my internship that summer at Pixar, but these were my people.

It wasn’t really about animation specifically. It was the feeling of being around people who still cared deeply about something. People who hadn’t completely optimized themselves away from wonder.

I felt that same thing again recently at an event where two guys performed a song live on stage. Within a few seconds I had that very specific modern instinct of wanting to secretly open Spotify because I needed to know what it was. I wanted to hear it again later. I wanted to sit with it by myself and pretend I had known it forever.

Afterward, I talked to them and found out they had been making music together since ninth grade.

Ninth grade.

And somehow, even as life pulled people in completely different directions, they kept the band alive. Some friends went into startups. Some into venture capital. Some took more traditional jobs. People grew up, built careers, exited companies, dealt with real adult life. But the music never fully disappeared. They still send each other ideas. They still get on stage. They still have this shared creative language from when they were fifteen that life somehow didn’t manage to kill.

And I think that’s the part that really got me. Because the people I admire most all seem to share this one thing in common:

They protected the part of themselves that felt alive.

Not perfectly, and not in some fantasy where practicality never mattered and nobody had bills or responsibilities or fear. But they REFUSED to completely optimize that part of themselves out of existence. And maybe that’s the real thing I’ve been trying to untangle lately.

It's not:“What career should I have?” Instead, it's: What kind of energy do I actually want to spend my life around?

Because once you experience rooms full of people who care deeply about making meaningful things, it becomes really hard to go back to environments where nobody seems emotionally connected to what they’re building.

That’s what I misunderstood all those years ago standing outside Pixar convinced that this life was for other people. The people on the other side of the gates were never actually that different from me.

Maybe they were just the people who protected the part of themselves that felt alive long enough to build a life around it.