How I Became a Calligrapher

One question pops up in my classes and ‘gram DMs more than any other: how did you become a calligrapher? Over the years, I’ve shared bits and pieces of my story. But today, I’m going to share the whole kit and caboodle – warts and all. And fair warning, this is a lengthy post. When I talk about my love for calligraphy, I have a hard time being brief. 

The Backstory

First, let’s go back. It all started on a cool, fall day in October 1986 when I was born… just kidding, we aren’t going that far back. Let’s just start with college. 

Babies! My best friend and soror Ruchi and I at graduation… 11+ years ago. But we look totally the same, right? RIGHT?!

No, I did not go to school to become a calligrapher, but I did study art. I got my bachelor’s degree in art history and a minor in studio art from Indiana University (go Hoosiers!). My plan (ha ha ha!) was to get my Bachelor’s in Art History, then my master’s and then hopefully a Ph.D. My ultimate goal was to work at an art museum as a researcher and educator. I felt – and still do – that fine art was often viewed as inaccessible and stuffy by a lot of people. And for good reason! While museums are great, they often cater only to those who can afford the admission fee and already have an understanding and appreciation of art. I wanted to work in a position that would allow me not only to study art, but to take that study and translate it in a way that it could reach more people on their level… and not just those with an Ivy League education and cash in their pocket. If you’ve taken any of my classes, this goal of making the formal more accessible may sound familiar. 

Yes, that was the plan. But it didn’t quite work out that way. In 2008, the economy tanked. Lehman Brothers went under and then so did everything else. And suddenly my plan to work in a museum with allllll the debt working through a PhD would certainly bring no longer seemed feasible. I had recently done an internship at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, and had been placed in the communications department. I thought, okay, public relations – that’s something I can do! And in a museum, too! But I had the wrong degree, and no one was hiring. So I did what every college grad of 2009 did: I applied to grad school.

I received my master’s degree in Public Relations from Boston University in 2011, and immediately began working at a PR agency. In healthcare. Not an art museum. You see, those jobs, as it turns out, were few and far between. For some reason, this had not occurred to me until I started to look for jobs – hey, I was 22, gimme a break. Healthcare, however, was booming, so it seemed like an okay compromise to make. Over the next several years, a few things happened. I got engaged to my college sweetheart (now hubby and baby daddy to our two daughters), moved to Philadelphia (still my all-time favorite place I’ve lived) and got a new job as the PR manager at a rehab hospital. And that’s really where my calligraphy story starts.

How I Got Started with Calligraphy

The wedding invitations I made for my wedding… you know, the ones I thought were REALLY good. :) Included in a package my grandma sent me of every card, photo and newspaper clipping I ever sent her. <3

Like lots of brides-to-be, I was pretty obsessed with my upcoming big day. Sure, for love, OBVI, but ALSO because it was an excuse to make all the things. If it could be DIYed, it would be DIYed. It had been so long since I had had the opportunity to be creative and work with my hands, and I went a little crazy. The result was elaborate bouquets made out of fabric scraps, hand painted cake toppers, handmade favors, escort cards, invitation suites… and also several trips to the doctor when I stepped on a crazy long embroidery needle that broke off in my foot – no joke. But of all my wedding DIYs, there was one I loved above the rest: calligraphy.

When I was planning out all my projects, I knew calligraphy had to be one of them. I had never done it before, but I had wanted to try ever since my nephew brought a calligraphy kit to Christmas one year. I desperately wanted to give it a whirl, but he wasn’t too keen on letting his aunt play with his new toy. So I bought a kit of my own. I picked up some italic fountain pens at a local craft store and bought a big yellow book called Calligraphy for Dummies, and off I went.

Now I would LOVE to tell you that when I put pen to paper for the first time, the heavens opened up, an angel delicately placed a crown of nibs on my head and I suddenly knew my life’s purpose. But that’s not how it went. I was not what you would call a natural. I struggled… a lot. I could not get the grip how I wanted it, and my letters definitely didn’t look like they did in the book. But one miraculous thing DID happen: I didn’t care. 

You see, I’m a clinical perfectionist. It’s a manifestation of my obsessive compulsive disorder (more on that in a bit), and at that time in my life, it meant that if I couldn’t do something perfectly, I didn’t want to do it at all. Before I got my OCD diagnosis and learned how to handle it, this little “quirk” of my brain caused oh-so-many truly humiliating moments. Lots of spontaneous crying in lots of classrooms when I couldn’t grasp a topic (even in grad school – gang, it was BAD), more inadvertent crying if I lost a race in track or at a swim meet, and full-blown sobs if I couldn’t get my ponytail just so. But here I was, doing something and sucking at it… and not caring. 

The whole process felt very meditative to me. Drawing the same strokes over and over was completely absorbing, and I found myself getting into a zone. I took my pens and a notepad everywhere. I practiced on my lunch breaks at work, I practiced in coffee shops (shout out to Volo Café in Manayunk where I did a whole lot of inking!), I practiced at home while watching tv. And as the days progressed into weeks, the pen started doing what I wanted it to do. Strokes went the direction I wanted, letters looked just as I had envisioned them in my head. It didn’t happen overnight and it didn’t happen because I forced myself to do drill after drill – it happened because I loved it and I gave it the space and time it needed to grow. 

After doing oodles of italic, I decided it was time to move onto that fancy pointed pen I heard everyone talking about. And then brush pens. And then paint brushes. I tried any method of calligraphy I could get my hands on, and my love grew and grew. During that time, my wedding came and went. But I was not done with calligraphy. 

From Hobby to Hustle

My very first booth at my very first art show! Manayunk Arts Fest 2013. Doesn’t look like much (it wasn’t), but it is the event I consider the official kick-off to my career as a calligrapher!

With the wedding over, I was missing my creative outlet. Sure, I was still doing calligraphy on my own time, but I wanted to do even more. One day, my newly minted husband suggested I open up an Etsy shop. He suggested I sell some of the items I made for our wedding, and I could add calligraphy in, too. I loved the idea! Well, the idea of selling the things I made for the wedding, at least. I wasn’t so sure about the calligraphy. I mean, I did it for fun, but I wasn’t all that good at it. Would people really want to buy that? After some hemming and hawing, I thought it couldn’t hurt and adding it to my shop. I called my shop The Polished Pig, named after our cat Piggy (who is still kicking at 13!) and also because I thought it sounded like the name of an Etsy shop.

One day several weeks later, I was on my lunch break and eating a sandwich in LOVE Park (yes, that LOVE Park) when my phone made this weird “cha-ching!” noise I had never heard before. I opened it up, and saw a little orange alert saying I had made a sale on Etsy. I think I audibly squealed, but again, it was LOVE Park, so no one noticed. But I was surprised to find that it wasn’t any of my handmade wedding décor that sold; it was my calligraphy. 

And then I sold some more calligraphy. And some more. Pretty soon, I realized I wasn’t actually in the wedding décor business – I was a calligrapher. So I changed the name of my shop to Manayunk Calligraphy (Manayunk being the neighborhood I lived in in Philly), and updated my listings to include signs and greeting cards. I also began offering up for my services for local businesses. The cool thing about Manayunk is that Main Street is populated almost entirely by locally-owned businesses, and many of those are owned by women. I truly believe had I lived anywhere else, I never would have had the guts to start my own business. Julie from The Wall gave me tons of business advice and helped me advertise my services to students at her spin studio. Molly and Brandy from The Little Apple stocked my greeting cards and art prints. Liz from Sweet Elizabeth’s Cakes ordered a custom calligraphy illustration of the Manayunk bridge… the very first word-based illustration I ever did, and what became the bread and butter of my business. Point is, because these women believed in me, I started to believe in myself. And that’s when things really changed. 

The Pink Elephant in the Room

This hunky fellow was by my side all throughout treatment. Treatment is always hard, but it’s much easier when you don’t have to go through it alone.

But it wasn’t all roses and sunshine. During this time, my OCD became too severe for me to handle on my own. It was clear I needed help that traditional outpatient therapy couldn’t provide.

Let me pause here to explain OCD a bit. Because of TV shows like Monk and Hoarders, a lot of folks have a very limited view of what OCD is. That’s why stores like Target still carry shirts that say “I have OCD: Obsessive Christmas Disorder,” whereas they don’t sell shirts making poor puns about bipolar disorder or postpartum depression – it’s seen as a personality quirk and not a serious mental illness. I can assure you this is not the case. The type of OCD I have is also known as Pure O. To bring a very complex subject down into a few sentences, people with this type of OCD have a hair trigger fight or flight response and are plagued by intrusive thoughts. These are thoughts you do NOT want to be having, but that everyone does – for example, if you and a friend were standing on top of a tall building, you may have a fleeting thought about pushing them off. When a person without OCD has an intrusive thought, they have no trouble letting it pass and moving on. But for those of us with OCD, this thought will trigger our fight or flight response (“Why did I think that? Am I dangerous?”). We become immediately panicked. Our brain tries to correct this by performing compulsions to make us feel better, like finding proof the thought isn’t true (“I love my friend, I would never do that.”), but OCD always fins a loop hole (“Yeah, but then why would you think it? A normal person wouldn’t think that.”). And round and round it goes, over and over again, without any end. It is a misery I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And there’s no “just ignore it.” There’s an old experiment in which a psychologist asked participants not to think about a pink elephant. They could think about anything else in the world, but not a pink elephant. Guess what they all thought about? The toll this takes on the sufferer is severe and scary, which is why people with Pure O are 10 times more likely to attempt suicide than the average person.

Again, I had reached a point where I couldn’t handle it on my own and the outpatient treatment I was receiving wasn’t enough. I took a partial medical leave from my PR job to enroll in an intensive treatment program at Penn Medicine. And when I say intensive, I mean it. It was several hours a week of direct treatment during the week plus hours of “homework” during evenings and weekends, and it went on for months. It was difficult and exhausting. Some days, it was all I could do to pull myself out of bed. But on good days, nothing helped occupy my mind like doing calligraphy. It didn’t matter if I was working on a client order or just practicing and trying new things. The fact is that when I was scripting, I wasn’t thinking.

I wasn’t in my own head, obsessing and performing compulsion after compulsion. I was focused and absorbed, I was using my hands and my heart, and my mind was relaxed. Those scary thoughts that would send me spiraling out of control were still there, of course, but they weren’t the center of my attention. They were like clouds, passing through, but not totally blocking out the sun. As the treatment began to kick in, those clouds became smaller and smaller, until a day came where I didn’t notice them at all. 

The thing about OCD is that it never truly goes away. Treatment is meant to help you manage it, not eradicate it. Since my treatment, I have had many, many additional episodes – and each time, calligraphy has been part of what pulls me out of the hole.

Life Is Too Short

6 years after leaving my job in PR to pursue calligraphy full-time, and still going strong — we’ve even added two calligraphers to the team!

Photo by Julia Romano

After I worked through treatment and started to see things more clearly, I had a realization: life is too short. Yes, it’s trite and totally overused. But damn it, it’s true. I had come to terms with the fact that I have a mental illness and I will never magically rid myself of it. I also realized that doing things with my hands helped me cope with said illness, and even helped keep episodes at bay. Sitting at a computer all day, not so much. And then I realized that it was totally possible for me to switch to a career where I could use my hands and be creative, but that I was already doing it on the side and making money from it. Decent money. So why, oh why, was I still sitting at a computer writing press releases?

Before I continue, I want to do a privilege check and acknowledge that leaving your job to pursue an artistic hobby is not an option for everyone. I was very, very lucky. First, I was married to a partner who was a salaried teacher making a full-time income. Second, we had no dependents. And third, we had friends and family members who would be willing and able to offer their homes and couches should the worst happen. I was and continue to be extremely privileged, and want to acknowledge that upfront. I hate seeing things online like “I earn 6 figures making kitten mittens, and so can you,” because those people clearly have no concept of the racial, cultural and socio-economic privilege they inherited. This is not at all meant to diminish their hard work or mine, but if we want to have any kind of meaningful conversation about entrepreneurship, it’s necessary for us to acknowledge that privilege plays a major role. 

After crunching the numbers and saving like maniacs, my husband and I set a date. A quit date. A full-time entrepreneurship date. A date where no matter what, I would leave my cube for good and pursue my passion full time. And I did just that. As for how I made it work from there? You’ll need to wait for another post to find out. :)