Annie: I think my perception has. I mean yes...because my perception of myself has changed. Where, um, I come from, to my immediate family, success was really important to them, and specifically academic success was really important to them. Like working really hard to be "successful" was really important to them and I hadn't yet identified that that was not important to me. Like the ways that I was trying to achieve something, I didn't even know where to be facing. What I was doing to be a good person in the world was based on definitions by my family. And you know that is how they serve themselves in the world and not me. So it took after I graduated to figure that out. I did not figure that out in school. It took me leaving school to learn that this is not important to me, um, to be a person who works really hard. Other things are important: connection and time with people, and spirituality, is more important to me than like um external environmental success. Not to say I don't enjoy it or I don't fall into a habit that I have to be conscious of, so art was serving one of those things before and it is serving another thing now. It was serving those before in school but kind of with a little dirty mix in there. Does that make sense?
Vidya: Well first things first, I was focused on being employed. Um, which started me working in custom framing and a local art supply store while I looked for a white collar job, which I got at the Natural Histoy Museum in New York City. So, I the got into exhbition deisgn and spent the next decade in that field and that world in house and in client services. I got to make a lot for things both expicity in art- related institutions and not, um, and so I as squarely in the field of applied arts and having my mind open to different possibilites for applied arts. At the same time, all the people I was meeting and working with, a huge number of them, a large percentage, had a creative practices that they were doing outside of their jobs. Um, and my own creative pursuits outside of my paid job, never felt real or special to me, or like Art with a capital A. And I still don't know that I really think of the things that I do as Art with a capital A. Um, but I'm realziing that Art with a capital A. might not exist. So yeah, there was so much unlearning happening but letting go of those things took years. And I think I came out of my education, I had since abandoned Art with a capital A, because I had chosen Design with a capital D, but I was attached to that capital letter that...I had such a dismissive attitude towards design with a lowercase d and art with a lowercase a, that I missed a lot for many years. A lot of beauty that was happening around me and so it took a long time, it was only when I sort of decided to commit to my own salvation that I, um, gave other poeple permission in my environment to own their own creativity and legitimize their creativity. In 2019 I quit my job and now I'm a pregnant creative, domestic, person. And there are things I want to make, and I am figuring out how to combine the resources and how to make those things happen but the first resources I need and the hardest to summon are the ones that are inside of me, nurtured or taken away from me, so it's 2022. So it has bee 3 years and I am still trying to light that fire inside. But it's a better place than the place where I don't believe the fire exists.