Ahmad Hussain
Don’t forget to enjoy the process.
Come, let’s tell a story, let’s build a community.
We put our stories into the world, to help the world understand who we are. However, once our stories enter the world, they no longer belong to us; the narratives we confess through words, images, sound and design inevitably serve as opportunities for others to feel understood. Through seeking and providing understanding we find a sense of belonging, and through that sense of belonging we build community.
In 2017, 3 months before I finished my undergraduate degree, I started working my dream job; I didn’t realize it at the time, but working at a small creative agency with a handful of likeminded creatives and entrepreneurs would be the highlight of my career for years to come. I had the opportunity to produce, write and direct projects for multi-national corporations, government entities, grassroots causes and small businesses. For two years, I poured myself into the agency: sixteen hour production days, polished pitch decks ignored by prospective clients, barebones budgets; yet every hurdle just felt like a badge of honour when a product was published.
Two years later, the day after wrapping a particularly difficult and prolonged production, I was admitted to the hospital, and shortly there after, I underwent surgery to remove a tumour from my brain. After two years of taking it all for granted, my career as a young creative entrepreneur came crashing to a halt.
I spent the next year between the hospital and home, overcoming infection, corrective surgeries, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, all while yearning to get back to telling engaging stories with colleagues that felt more like family than coworkers.
In mid 2020, when I was finally ready to get back to work, the world I once flourished in no longer existed. The COVID-19 pandemic had changed the fabric of life for everyone, but for someone who had already been living in an alternate version of normal for over a year, this new reality was especially disappointing. Although I was eager to jump back in, like so many other small agencies, 2020 was the year that The Archery Club closed up shop. For the first time in my adult life I faced the prospect that many of my peers had already faced years ago: get a boring day job.
In the time that has passed since the start of the pandemic, I have worked as a bank teller, a federal government administrator and even had a brief stint as a marketing manager. However, the moments that shine brightest in my career since I re-entered the workforce were the experiences where I was recruited to projects by fellow creative practitioners to help them achieve their visions for a story that needed to be told. For brief periods in the early 2020s I was entrusted by businesses, artists and creatives to help bring their stories to life alongside scrappy crews, with bootstrapped resources; for short scattered moments I once again felt like I was living my dream.
For far too long, I ignored my calling in an attempt to find a sense of stability in a volatile world. I have wrestled with fears of inadequacy and rejection to come to a place where I feel worthy of the work I dream of. Today, I choose to be bold in the face of uncertainty. Finding thoughtful stories, shaping them with my creative, technical toolkits and leveraging my experience to bring them to life is not simply a career choice for me, it is entrenched in my purpose and is truly a privilege I will never take for granted again.