There was a time when Ezra felt like he had the world at his fingertips. Fresh out of design school, he was eager, talented, and—most dangerously—trusting. He saw freelance work as a golden ticket, a way to craft a name for himself while helping others bring their visions to life. Ezra loved to draw, create, and tell stories since he was a young child. He was pursuing his calling, he felt. But people, being the way they are, came along and sucked all the joy out of it, crushing his creative soul for years.
The first blow came from a woman he knew from the bank where he worked part-time. She was writing a children’s book, something whimsical and soft, built around her delicate watercolor illustrations. She asked Ezra to scan her paintings and lay out the pages, so she had something polished to send to publishers. She had no budget, but she assured him, “This could lead to more work, real work, and you’d have a great piece for your portfolio.”
Ezra spent hours perfecting it—aligning every brushstroke, pairing every word with the right curve of color, ensuring the rhythm of the spreads felt just right. Her paintings were frankly pretty sloppy, which would be fine if that was what she was going for, but she wanted precision and apparently wanted Ezra to make her work more precise. That detail of course wasn’t shared up-front, after putting his own money into multiple draft printouts at Kinko’s the scope creep started to cost him big time. It took quite a bit of Photoshop work to get the images to look halfway decent. She approved the last round of prints and then handed over the files before she moved to Oregon.
A few days later, she was on the phone, furious. “The images are blurry! You gave me garbage!” she shrieked over the phone.
It was an ugly phone call. He wasn’t great with confrontations. Ezra, confused, asked what she meant. He’d given her a professional, print-ready document made with industry standard design software, but she had some amateur pull it up to look at it with her, where the layout software only showed a low-resolution preview–which was normal because computers weren’t quite as powerful back then. No amount of explaining could convince her otherwise. Whatever bonehead looked at it with her should have known better, too.
She actually threatened to sue him. Over a free favor. Ever encountered someone who can’t be reasoned with at all? Ezra had quite a few times, and this was one of the most prevalent times. It doesn’t appear she ever got her book published, or it was just really hard to find. You have to wonder if she stood in her own way of her success through her thickheadedness, or it just didn’t happen for other reasons? Maybe it’s karma.
The second hit came from a smooth-talker who called himself an entrepreneur. He had “big ideas,” and all he needed was a capable designer to bring them to life. Websites—just a few of them. Nothing major. In return, Ezra would get a 2% cut of the huge profits for a whole year, and those huge profits were certain to come rolling in.
Excited, he dove in, setting up sleek, functional pages, making sure every detail was clean and engaging. And then, silence. Calls unanswered. Emails ignored. The sites were up, but Ezra saw none of the promised profits.
Ghosted. No payment ever.
That was when the in-house corporate world started to look less like a cage and more like a shield. At least there, he got paid. But security came with a different kind of cost—one that drained him slowly, bit by bit. He found himself designing things that meant nothing, things that existed only to satisfy marketing metrics and overpaid executives who thought “edgy” meant “use a slightly darker shade of blue and a slightly bigger logo.” He sat in rooms where passion was wrung dry by design-by-committee revisions.
One day, he realized he hadn’t drawn anything for himself in years. The real damage done, the real price of these bad experiences with people both freelancing and in the corporate world, was that they took away the joy he had to create. He had spent so long creating for others, for approval, for a check, that he had forgotten what it felt like to create simply because he wanted to.
So one evening, long after his laptop had been shut for the day, he pulled out an old sketchbook. He let the pencil glide, no briefs, no expectations. Then came paint. Then came ideas. For the first time in forever, he felt free. Maybe no one would ever see these pieces. Maybe they weren’t “marketable.”
But for once, it didn’t matter. Ezra was creating again—not for clients, not for profit, not for anyone else. Just for himself. And that was enough.
