The Next Big Thing
Mathieu Hébert: From lawyer to graphic designer.
Originally published in SCAN Magazine, Spring 2022 issue. Also available at scadscan.com.
It was spring 2019. Mathieu Hébert stood at the edge of a void, considering his options. Before him was the great unknown. Behind was a coveted law career ten years in the making. There was a moment of panic. Then came the jump.
*****
“I was from Montreal, Canada, but I had to leave the country, you know,” Hébert mused, as part of his introduction to our class. It sounded positively Scorsesian. What could have possibly happened to make a thirty-something lawyer quit his job, move countries and take up graphic design?
Halfway through the quarter, Hébert proved to be a capable graphic designer.
“Look at this,” said our professor as he flipped through his project. “If an ex-lawyer can do this, so can you.”
Mutters and murmurs. The professor turned back to Hébert. “But you’re not gonna go back to law?”
“Nope,” said Hébert. “Never.”
We muttered and murmured some more. To a room mostly made up of twenty-year-olds, to whom a stable career and good money felt most precious, his certainty felt quite sacrilegious. And yet, not so long ago, such certainty was unthinkable for Hébert.
“I’ve always kind of known what I didn’t want to do, but not what I did want to do.” Coming from a family of medical professionals, he tried to follow the natural sciences around the end of high school until some time into his first year of college. “I just didn’t vibe with them.” He then reversed course to do a full year of the humanities: Spanish, nutrition, psychology, criminology and, most notably, criminal law, which first showed him how law could give him the best of both worlds, where the high technicality of the sciences meets the humane side of social studies. In Canada, you don’t need a pre-law degree to apply to law school. Instead, lawyer-hopefuls would undergo three years of education and one year of specialization. Hébert applied to Sherbrooke University in 2006. He got in. “I really love it. Law makes you understand politics, the Constitution, international relations —” His eyes got very big at this point. “Honestly, everything is so interesting to learn. I wished I had a million lifetimes so I could learn everything. But the world is made in such a way that you have to pick something, and that is heartbreaking.”
The decision was made. Degrees in hand, he entered the field as a title attorney, handling wills, estates and inheritance. Three years in a law firm, three years in an accounting firm, and then finally: the big job at National Bank Trust. It was the perfect gig: nice pay, good perks, great location in downtown Montreal. Estates law was broad enough to fight off the supposed monotony of legal practices.
“You have to close every door of the deceased’s legal affair. It’s stressful sometimes, but the thing is, you’re helping people out. At the end of the day, it’s not the money you made. It’s not the law cases you cracked, that’s not a victory. A victory is more like ‘There’s this poor old lady, her husband died, she didn’t know what to do, there’s this big tax debt and we found this solution.’ That’s what you leave with.”
“But then I asked myself, ‘Could I do this for the next 30 years?’ and I just got so depressed.”
Hébert considered himself to always be moving. The consummate student. The eager adventurer, jumping courses in school and jumping fields as an adult. Yet now he had found himself in the sinkhole of a perfect job in a coveted career, furiously avoiding the question that nagged in that backwater region of his head.
“Now what?”
The answer for that has been decided, in part, years ago, in the summer of 2009, when Hébert first met his wife.
*****
In summer 2009, Hébert was an intern at Service Canada, a government office. His now-wife worked in the same office, different division. He dealt with pensions. She worked with the unemployed. “I had no idea she existed.”
One morning, Hébert showed up to see firefighters outside the building. A gas pipe had burst. The interns regrouped at the front. A girl asked him what was going on. They started to talk. He asked her
to breakfast. “And, uh, we decided to walk. And, uh, we decided to talk. And, uh, we never stopped talking.” As he told me this, the smile he had on stretched into a grin.
From then, emails flew back and forth, business hours or no. But she, a Muslim girl with strict parents, having just come out of a relationship, was hesitant. His offers to take her out was shot down each time with an excuse — “I have volleyball practice!” Hébert reenacted. “And I was like, ‘You don’t play volleyball!’” In the end, she said yes, so he took her to a restaurant. They caught the subway home. At his stop, right before the doors closed, he
tried to kiss her. She gave him a belly rub. The door closed. He watched, stunned, as the train whisked her away. Cue music.
Everything then flowed like a rom-com montage. Party. First kiss. Moonlight. She is born in Pakistan, raised in Atlanta, educated in a Quebecois medical school, with plans of interning in the U.S. and eventually becoming a doctor. She loves medical TV drama, most styles of shoes and, ever since 2009, she’s loved Hébert. Two years later, when her program ended and she began her internships in the U.S., their relationship became long-distance. This lasted for eight years.
“Eight years?” I asked for the third time.
“It was insane,” he said. “I’ve never heard of that. But we were both so busy, we talked every day or so and got excited for vacation.”
The love story is Disney-worthy. He would drive for hours across the border to see her whenever she was reasonably near. “It was work, making that conscious decision to stay together, because we knew we were going to end up together, that we were going to be married eventually.” The end goal was clear, but there was the American-Canadian border sitting rudely before it. It was either she comes back to Canada, or he follows her to the U.S. Easier said than done. Conditions were better for her in the States. He had a law career in Canada.
In 2018, her dream was realized: she landed a job as a doctor at a hospital in Rome, Georgia. The time to decide was here. “I thought: Okay, this is it. Whatever romantic idea I had of love — do I love her enough that I would quit my career that I’d been working on for ten years?”
A law degree in Canada doesn’t hold value in the U.S. Lawyering — with all its perks, pay and prestige would be out of the question. It was precious, the dream of hordes of twenty-somethings hunching over their tables in college dorms and university libraries. But was it that precious?
“I was scared. There was so much at stake. We’ve never lived together for a long time, so what if it doesn’t work? Do I put everything on the line and if I lose it, do I start over? Actually, I watched one of Tim Ferriss’s podcasts about ‘fear settings,’ he said to put everything on paper. When you put it on paper, it isn’t so scary. If living together doesn’t work for whatever reason, I can always move back. It helps to make peace with the transition.”
To be safe, from 2017 to 2019, Hébert got an MBA in Business, something internationally recognized.But he didn’t go into business. The instinct of the consummate student returned: there was going to be a big adventure. He compared it to Bilbo Baggins’s in “The Hobbit.” In May 2019, he quit his job. The question that had been hanging there, “Now what?” was revealed to have been partly answered all along. His future wife had filled half of the blank in for him.
Now what? Well, he didn’t know exactly what, but it was always going to be something new.
*****
“If you ask my dad, he’s gonna be like, ‘Yeah, Mat’s not creative. I don’t know what the hell he’s doing there.’”
But Hébert has always been drawing — he’d just never shown his drawings to anyone before, never thinking it was real art. Maybe that’s why he blushes so hard when the class makes wowing noises at his projects now.
“I just went back to zero, to before I went into law, like ‘Okay, what are my passion, what’s lacking in my life?’ And I had this gaping creativity hole. There’s nothing really creative in law. People who tell you otherwise are full of s*** — ‘Oh, I found this great way to speak to the judge.’ Yeah, it’s called talking. Big deal.”
But he didn’t want his keenness for the technical side of things (or that MBA in Business) to go to waste. Graphic design jumped out at him as the obvious choice. Once again, Hébert went for the best of both worlds, where business meets art, where technicality meets humanity. “There was a purpose behind it. Besides,” he added, “I had zero confidence in my fine arts skill. I’d only just started.”
At this point, I offered some consolations. Henri Matisse also started art quite late, after a stint in a lawyer’s office. Hébert assured me the two of them were not the same. Of course not. Among many things, Matisse’s venture into art allegedly disappointed his father.
“I was scared of telling my parents I’m going to —” his hands made a weird flourish, “art school. I thought they were going to destroy me, for sure.”
“My mother’s always been afraid of everything. When it comes to taking risks, she’s going to put a cold shower over your passion.” Hébert was sure his father was the same, having always highlighted the importance of “the hustle.” To his surprise, both of his parents were supportive. “Maybe it’s because they’re retired now, so they’re more chill than I remember. My dad was like, ‘Awesome. Do it. The big decision was already to switch countries and drop your career.’”
In fact, it was his father that helped him pack up the U-Haul and drove with him in the three-day journey to Rome. They sold his winter tires — no longer will they be needed in the American South. “It made everything real. This is my life now. I’m here, there’s no turning back.”
In 2019, Hébert and his wife got married. In the same year, he enrolled at SCAD, using the money he’s saved up as a lawyer. Much like how he supported his wife back when she was in school, his wife now supports him as he is in school, in more ways than just financially. “My wife is my art director. She has good eyes, so she helps me tailor some of my work.”
“I’ve done a bunch of stuff, but I’ve never worked as much as when I’ve been at SCAD in terms of both brain power and time. I’ve done some drawing classes where I was shading for my life for like eighty hours, but you go into a flow state where it’s not painful. It’s a lot of energy, but it’s not a chore. I’ve never worked so much, but I’ve never enjoyed the work so much either.”
I told Hébert once that he strikes me more as an ex-child actor for Disney Channel more than an ex-lawyer.
“You’re too happy about your schoolwork,” I said. “It freaks me out.”
“That’s because I’ve been to the dark side,” he replied. “Now I get to do this.”
Before the move, Hébert had posed himself a hypothetical: Were he to get $10 million tomorrow, were the precious job and its financial security to become unnecessary, what would he want to do for the rest of his life? The answer back then was a void.
But then there we were, finishing our interview in class, our design projects on display. He had jumped into the void. The void had given him art.
“So what about now?” I asked. “What if you get ten million now?”
Up at the big table, our professor was talking about the importance of good lighting. Hébert answered me without a second thought:
“I would do this exact same thing.”
