The City That Sees You: How New York Made Me Mikey Yaw

I grew up in Cincinnati.

Cincinnati is a genuinely great arts town, more culture than most people give it credit for, good people, easy life. I worked in my family's hearse business, which taught me more about human nature than any classroom could. Life was comfortable. Predictable. Quiet in the way that comfort always is.

And I couldn't wait to leave.

Not because Cincinnati failed me. But because something in me kept pointing toward something larger. I would take vacations to Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, New York, and every time I returned home, the quiet felt louder. The pace felt slower. The ceiling felt lower. I kept pressing my face against the glass of a life that felt like it was happening somewhere else, to someone else, in a city that moved the way I moved inside my own head.

I was 29 when I finally did something about it.

I put my condo on the market without a real plan. It sold fast, faster than I expected, and suddenly I had two weeks to be out. New York or bust. I flew up one weekend to find an apartment. The next weekend I moved. There was no time to think it through, which was exactly what I needed. If I'd had a month I would have talked myself out of it. The speed of it was the mercy of it.

Learning the City

The first time I had to navigate the subway alone, really alone, no one to follow, just me and the map and the noise and the crowd, I was genuinely intimidated. New York doesn't ease you in. It just starts, and you either figure it out or you don't, and either way the trains keep moving.

Over time it got easier. The city always does, eventually. You stop looking at the map. You start walking like you know where you're going even when you don't. And somewhere in that process the city stops feeling like something happening to you and starts feeling like something you're part of.

I found myself working in places that felt like the city was trying to tell me something. Wall Street. The Flatiron Building. A renowned building on the Upper East Side where Halston once worked. I kept meeting actors and dancers and people who were out there every day, just hustling, working toward something that hadn't happened yet but that they were certain was coming.

I watched some of them make it. Watched them go from struggling to known. And I remember thinking: why do they get to work on their own terms and I don't?

And then I thought: because that looks hard, and I like having a paycheck and health insurance.

So I stayed in the day job. But something had gotten in through the cracks. A taste of creative freedom that I didn't know what to do with yet but couldn't unfeel.

The Invisible Years

I have been the black sheep of my family my whole life. I don't say that with bitterness. I love them. But we are just different, in ways that are hard to bridge. I felt it growing up. I felt invisible in ways that accumulate over time, quietly, until you start to believe the invisibility is the truth about you.

I was bullied in school. I think because I'm sensitive. And I've come to understand that sensitivity isn't a weakness. It's the whole point. Art requires it. The ability to feel things at a frequency other people aren't tuned to, to notice what's underneath the surface of things, to care about what something looks like and means and says. that's not something to apologize for. That's the source.

But when you spend enough years being told that the thing you are is wrong, you learn to make yourself small. To not take up space. To be invisible before anyone else can make you invisible first.

I carried that into New York. Into every office. Into every room.

The Rebirth

Then the pandemic came. And with it, a kind of stillness that forced a reckoning.

During the stretches when the world had gone quiet, I watched art documentaries for hours. I became obsessed with the BBC's Perspectives series and Fake or Fortune. I fell in love with the Impressionists. What they did was so brave, so new, so willing to be rejected. And I became fascinated with Georges Seurat. I got a membership at MoMA and started going constantly. I can stand in front of a Seurat painting and forget time exists. All those individual dots, each one almost nothing on its own, coming together into something luminous and whole. It fascinates me in a way I still can't entirely explain.

Maybe because a kid in Cincinnati once made something that captured the same spirit, not with a brush and paint, but with magic markers, never realizing that his art teacher had planted something in him that was simply there, waiting to be found.

I started making art from photos, manipulating images, adding effects, animating things, building visual stories. The first creations were about me. All the feelings I was carrying, everything I was processing. I don't think people quite knew what to think. It was unexpected. Maybe I was unexpected, even to myself.

But I kept going. I learned more. I got better. I figured out motion and music and how to make something that felt like what was happening inside my head. 

Eventually the well ran dry telling stories about me. Corporate America got unreliable. And something in me had shifted permanently.

Then the marketing industry found me or I found it. For the first time professionally, people saw the thing I had been hiding. This dynamic, creative person I didn't fully believe in yet — they could see it. They nurtured it. They asked me to do presentations on Mikey Yaw. They asked me to bring in products and talk about them. They put me in rooms and let me take up space.

I don't think they understood what they were unlocking. I'm not sure I did either.

I started drawing. Which is something I never thought I could do, even though, now that I think about it, I won an award, a ribbon really, at a local art fair for that pointillism drawing in grade school. The kid who could do it was always there. He just got buried under a few decades of being told he was too much, or not enough, or simply invisible.

What came out the other side of all of it was something I can only describe as an idgaf attitude. Not reckless, just free. At some point I stopped caring whether people approved of what I was making and started caring only about the making itself. The visions I'd had in my head since childhood, images, shapes, colors, things I never thought I could do anything with, I started pulling them out and putting them into the world.

That's Mikey Yaw.

Not a brand that was planned or pitched or built on a business model. A thing that grew out of a person finally deciding to take up space. Designs that come from intuition and end when something feels right; designs that don't apologize for existing.

What New York Taught Me

New York didn't make me. But it showed me something the quiet places couldn't.

In this city, being exactly who you are isn't a liability. It's currency. The misfits and the dreamers and the people who didn't fit where they came from — they're not the exception here. They're the whole population. Everyone came from somewhere that felt too small. Everyone is building something. Everyone is becoming.

I came from Cincinnati at 29 with a sold condo and two weeks and no plan.

I found, eventually, that the person I'd been hiding was the most interesting thing about me.

Mikey Yaw is what happens when you stop hiding it.