What I've Done Is What I Am
What I’ve Done Is What I Am
The Wrong Question
Is how I think of myself a valuable asset?
I’ve spent years circling this question. Turning it over. Trying to construct a self-concept that would survive contact with the world — with hiring managers, grant panels, residency committees, people who ask “So what do you do?” and expect an answer that fits in a sentence.
The answer is no. The question has the wrong shape.
How I think of myself is irrelevant. What I’ve done is what I am. The self-concept is noise. The portfolio is signal. The gap between “I see myself as a creative systems builder” and “I have evidence of sustained creative systems building” is the gap between narrative and proof. Narrative is cheap. Proof is 97 repositories, 8 organizations, 404,000 words of documentation, and 41 published essays. The proof doesn’t care what I think about it. It just exists.
This essay is about closing that gap — not by adjusting the self-concept, but by pointing at what’s already built and saying: that’s the answer. Stop asking the question.
Three Thousand Applications
I applied to roughly 1,000 teaching positions over the course of several years. Community college adjunct slots, university lecturer posts, graduate assistantships, online teaching gigs. I tailored every cover letter. I referenced my coursework, my publications, my pedagogical philosophy. I described how I’d structure a semester, how I’d handle student engagement, how I’d assess learning outcomes.
I always knew in my heart I would lose those jobs to people who actually wanted them.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about mass applications: the process selects for desire, not capability. The person who genuinely lights up at the thought of teaching freshman composition three times a week will always outperform the person who’s applying because they need income while they build something else. The hiring committee can feel it. The enthusiasm gap is legible in every cover letter, every teaching demonstration, every answer to “Where do you see yourself in five years?” The honest answer — not here — disqualifies you before you open your mouth.
Then came the marketing and UX jobs. Roughly 2,000 of them. Content strategist. UX researcher. Digital marketing specialist. Information architect. Product copywriter. Brand voice consultant. I was qualified for all of these. I had the portfolio work, the analytical chops, the writing samples. I could do the work.
I didn’t want to do the work.
I wanted to build environments for creative practice. I wanted to design systems that coordinated theory, art, and commerce under a single governance model. I wanted to make the process of creation visible and reproducible. I wanted to commodify the creative process itself. None of that fits on a job application for “Content Strategist III at a mid-size SaaS company.” So I applied anyway, and I lost, and I applied again, and I lost again, three thousand times, performing the desire for a life I didn’t want while the life I did want was accumulating in private repositories and midnight design documents.
This is what imposter syndrome actually looks like from the inside. Not “I don’t deserve success.” Not “I’m not qualified.” Those are the clinical descriptions, and they’re wrong — or at least incomplete. The lived experience is stranger: I don’t belong in your category. I’m applying to be a content strategist, but I’m a systems architect who writes. I’m applying to teach composition, but I’m a builder who uses writing as a construction material. The imposter feeling isn’t that I’m insufficient. It’s that I’m applying to the wrong thing, and I know it, and I’m doing it anyway because rent is due and the system I’m building doesn’t pay yet.
The gambit is seeing yourself as an artist, a thinker, a systems builder — while filling out an application to be a marketing coordinator. The dissonance doesn’t resolve. You learn to hold it.
The Lineage
There’s a thing Quentin Tarantino said about Tony Scott’s method. Scott would set up multiple cameras on a scene — five, six, sometimes more — covering every angle simultaneously. He’d shoot massive volumes of footage, far more than any single scene required. The actors would perform, and Scott would film everything. Then the real work began: the edit. The film was made not on set but in the editing room, where Scott would assemble the raw material into something that moved and breathed and hit you in the chest. The product was made in the edit. The set was just the environment that generated the raw material.
This is the method I recognize as my own. Build the environment. Film everything. Assemble in the edit. The creative intelligence isn’t in the performance — it’s in the architecture of the environment and the judgment of the edit.
Terrence Malick understood this at a deeper level. The Tree of Life was shot over years, with hundreds of hours of footage that Malick cut and recut for six years. The film’s final form bears almost no relationship to its screenplay. It became what it was not through planning but through assembly — through the act of placing one image next to another and discovering what they meant together. The creature became fully formed in the edit.
This method has a lineage, and it runs through music as much as film.
Brian Eno, in the 1970s, turned the recording studio into a compositional instrument. He didn’t perform; he designed environments — tape loops, generative processes, oblique strategies — and let music grow in them. The creative act wasn’t playing an instrument. It was building the system in which sound organized itself.
Trent Reznor took a different path to the same destination. He played every instrument on Pretty Hate Machine himself. Not out of vanity, but necessity: the teenage band never formed. There were no instrument-in-arms brethren who would commit at the level the work required. The people who could play didn’t share the vision; the people who shared the vision couldn’t play. So Reznor learned to do it all himself. He became a one-person orchestra, not as a philosophical statement but as a practical solution to the problem of creative isolation.
Prince was the bridge between these approaches. Multi-instrumentalist, producer, vocalist, visual director, choreographer — he built Paisley Park not as a recording studio but as a creative environment, a self-contained world where every aspect of the work could be controlled, refined, and integrated under a single vision. Prince didn’t delegate because delegation meant compromise, and the work couldn’t afford compromise. The through-line is clear: Eno designed systems, Reznor became the system, Prince built a world around the system.
Brian Wilson, a decade before any of them, did the same thing with Pet Sounds. He fired the band — not in anger, but functionally. He brought in session musicians and directed them like a film director: play this part, now play it sadder, now play it at half speed and I’ll layer it at double. Wilson wasn’t performing. He was assembling. The album was made in the edit.
These are my reference points. I don’t invoke them to claim equivalence — that would be absurd. I invoke them because they describe a mode of production that I recognize: solo creation at full intensity, where the environment generates the material and the editorial vision assembles it into something coherent. Creating in the dark, without an audience, without collaborators, because the work demands it and nobody else will commit at the level required.
The Evidence
The organvm system is the evidence.
Not the evidence that I’m an artist — that’s a narrative claim, and narrative claims are cheap. The evidence that I can sustain creative practice at institutional scale. That’s a structural claim, and structural claims require proof.
Here is the proof: 97 repositories across 8 GitHub organizations. A dependency architecture that enforces unidirectional flow — theory feeds art feeds commerce, never the reverse. A promotion pipeline that governs how work moves from private to public. A governance model with architectural decision records, community health files, and automated validation. 404,000+ words of documentation spanning 72 documented repositories and 41 published essays. 33 named development sprints executed in sequence. A Jekyll site with an Atom feed, POSSE distribution to Mastodon and Discord, and an essay pipeline with automated validation against a frontmatter schema.
None of this is “how I think of myself.” All of it is what I built.
The distinction matters because self-concept is mutable, fragile, and unfalsifiable. I can think of myself as anything — a genius, a fraud, a systems builder, a failed academic. The thought has no weight. But the system exists independently of what I think about it. The repositories are public. The essays are published. The governance model is documented. The dependency graph is validated. Someone can look at this and disagree about its quality or its significance, but they can’t disagree about its existence. The evidence is there.
This is what closes the gap between self-concept and identity. Not a better narrative. Not more confidence. Not therapy (though therapy helps). What closes the gap is overwhelming evidence — a body of work so large, so documented, so publicly accountable that the question “Am I really a creative systems builder?” becomes absurd. Of course you are. Look at it.
Commodifying the Creative Process
The thesis of the entire organvm system is that the creative process itself has value — not just the outputs, but the process by which outputs are generated, coordinated, and made visible.
This is what ORGAN-V (Public Process) exists to prove. Every sprint documented. Every governance decision recorded. Every architectural trade-off examined in essay form. The documentation isn’t a byproduct of the creative work. It IS creative work. The act of rendering process into prose, of making visible the decisions that shape a system — that’s the product.
When a grant reviewer reads this portfolio, they’re not evaluating finished artworks. They’re evaluating a methodology for sustained creative production. When a residency committee reads the artist statement, they’re assessing whether the practitioner can sustain practice at the level they claim. The organvm system answers both questions not with narrative — “I’m a dedicated artist” — but with evidence: here is the system, here is the documentation, here is the process by which it was built.
Commodifying the creative process means making the act of creation visible, governable, reproducible, and valuable. It means treating documentation as a first-class deliverable. It means publishing not just the finished work but the sprints, the failures, the architectural decisions, the governance rules. It means building a system that can be audited, extended, and learned from — not just admired.
This IS the purpose of the organvm system. Not “being an artist.” Being an artist is a narrative. The purpose is building a documented, governed, publicly accountable creative infrastructure that proves creative practice can operate at institutional scale. That’s evidence, not identity. And evidence is what survives contact with the world.
What Imposter Syndrome Gets Wrong
Imposter syndrome persists because identity is narrative, not evidence. The narrative says: “I’m not qualified. I don’t belong. Someone will find out.” The narrative is self-referential — it refers to itself for proof, and since it’s already convinced, it always finds what it’s looking for.
Evidence works differently. Evidence doesn’t care about your internal narrative. Evidence is the 97 repositories that exist whether you feel qualified or not. Evidence is the 41 essays that are published whether you think you’re a real writer or not. Evidence is the 33 sprints that were executed whether you believe you’re a real systems builder or not.
The re-direction is this: stop asking “Am I?” and start pointing at what exists.
“Am I a creative systems builder?” is an identity question. It invites imposter syndrome because it asks you to assess yourself against an imagined standard. “Did I build a creative system?” is an evidence question. It has an answer. The answer is yes. The system is here. You can look at it.
This doesn’t make imposter syndrome disappear. The feeling persists — it’s neurological, habitual, deeply grooved. But it changes the response. Instead of trying to believe the right thing about yourself (which is narrative management, not evidence), you point at the thing that exists. The portfolio is the argument. The system is the proof. What I’ve done is what I am.
The Re-Direction
Here is what I’m redirecting away from: the endless interior negotiation about whether I’m “really” an artist, “really” a systems thinker, “really” qualified for the life I’m building. That negotiation is a waste of time. Not because the doubts are wrong — they might be right — but because the negotiation produces no evidence. It just produces more narrative.
Here is what I’m redirecting toward: the body of work. Point at it. Let it speak.
The organvm system exists. Eight organizations. Ninety-seven repositories. Four hundred thousand words. Forty-one essays. Thirty-three sprints. Automated governance. Public accountability. A Jekyll site, an RSS feed, POSSE distribution. A dependency architecture with constitutional invariants. A promotion pipeline. A validated registry.
I built this. Not “I think of myself as someone who builds things like this.” I built this.
The re-direction wash is the act of cleaning the self-concept with evidence. You don’t need a better story about who you are. You need to stop telling stories and point at what’s there. The evidence doesn’t need you to believe in it. It just needs you to stop obscuring it with narrative.
What I’ve done is what I am. The rest is noise.