Where Patterns Begin - The First Place I Learned to Build

Last week, I wrote about recognizing a lifelong pattern of trying to be seen by people who never had the capacity to receive me—and how choosing myself finally brought that cycle to an end.

This week, I want to go further back. Not to explain the pattern, but to return to the place where something else was already forming.

I was seven years old and was rarely bored.

I knew how to disappear into my own world, quietly, completely. I built elaborate houses out of blocks for my Barbies and Little Kiddles on the living room floor, arranging furniture just so, imagining how people moved through space. I sat for hours at the dining room table, drawing, painting, cutting, gluing. I baked from old cookbooks, carefully following instructions I barely understood, trusting that if I paid attention, something good would come out of the oven.

No one stood over me.
No one guided the process.
No one told me it was special.

I was left to my own devices, and in that space, I learned how to build.

One of the clearest scenes I can still see is my father’s men’s clothing store. I started working there young, folding shirts, wrapping packages, and standing behind the counter during the holiday rush. I remember the weight of the fabric in my hands, the smell of cardboard boxes and cologne, the dark brown and ecru packaging stamped with Dennis Light Men's Wear. I recall knowing exactly what outfit I wanted to wear to work; even then, clothes mattered to me. Style mattered. It wasn’t about vanity; it was about identity.

My dad understood that instinctively. He loved clothes, cars, and good food. He always looked put together. He didn’t talk much about creativity, but he lived it, building something of his own, working for himself, never answering to anyone else. I absorbed more from watching him than I realized at the time.

At home, it was different. Creativity wasn’t encouraged or discouraged; it simply happened out of view. My mom was often at the kitchen table, playing solitaire and smoking, or in bed with a book propped against her legs. She was there, but not fully present.
 

No one was tracking what I was making in my bedroom while Carole King, Elton John, or James Taylor played softly in the background.

So I became my own witness.

At seven, I developed my first product. I don’t remember exactly how the idea arrived, only that it did, and that it felt important. I sold it behind the handball courts at school, not because anyone told me to, but because it seemed obvious: I made something—someone might want it.

That moment wasn’t just about the product. It was about agency.

Looking back now, I see that this was the beginning of a creative landscape no one, including me, could have predicted.

 

Making things led to selling things.
Selling things led to an opportunity.
Opportunity led to independence.

Again and again, when I needed a way forward, creativity and intuition showed me one.

I wasn’t given money or resources to explore these instincts. I wasn’t rescued or directed. What I was given, implicitly, was the understanding that if I wanted something, I would need to figure out how to get there myself.

And I did.

Over time, this became familiar terrain. When I needed confidence, I built it. When I needed income, I created it. When I needed a sense of self, I expressed it through clothes, through design, through making something that hadn’t existed before.

Long before I had words like entrepreneur or self-starter, I was already living inside them.

Quietly.
Independently.
And in my own way.

Where did you first learn how to build something for yourself? You don’t need to answer it. Just notice what memory appears.

With love and creativity,
Susan

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