The seeds were first planted for this thesis work from a curious ask, looking away from the logo files on my desktop out the window, of “Why am I here?” and our need as creatives to be enough. I reflected on how we look falsely to our clients for approval, permission, and purpose to fill that void. Then an uncomfortable rock bottom forced a look inward, plowing deep into the roots of my childhood on our family farm.

This thesis is an autoethnographic study about understanding the addicted artist and the resilience and mindfulness tools that can lead to physical, mental, and spiritual health. For example, how to build a safe space where a creative career and life can align honestly and authentically. In addition, how through the work of recovery, you are responsible for cultivating and creating your own gratitude design practice.

This gratitude design practice is accomplished through resilience, optimism, and mindfulness. From skies and skills to plows and pixels, this work also digs deeper into the history of hardships. How farm life lessons are a continuum from before my time in history, and how now even with all the progress and new technologies, the original ways of cultivation, employment, and spirituality have persisted even to how I run my design firm today. Writing revealed a continuous theme of hope and gratitude in hard times that I was unaware I practiced. This constant optimism, hard work ethic, and gratitude outlook founded on an agrarian Christian rural raisin’ is what motivated me to work so hard in life in the hope that by helping, producing, and making it all I would be enough. I had been focused on peacekeeping and seeking external praise, not realizing what I was searching for was inside me all along.

My goal is that you might look inside yourself at what you are numbing from, and what practicing gratitude might look and feel like to you. What form does it take? Does your approach to projects begin in gentle, honest questions, kindness and