Jeanelle Frontin is a Caribbean-born creative with many strings to her bow.

Her debut novel, The Unmarked Girl, received the CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best 100 Indie Books of 2019. She works at CreaTech Labs as a creative technologist, where she recently co-created the short AI film, Make A Living, a finalist in Runway’s Gen:48 global competition. 

A member of Black Creatives Aotearoa, her work explores the intersections of storytelling, emerging technology, and social insight. Frontin is currently pursuing a PhD in information measurement using explainable AI at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, through a research scholarship supported by an MBIE Smart Ideas grant.

Frontin shares with The Big Idea things she wished she knew back in her younger days.

Dreams are never lost, only delayed

You’re in the middle of your Master’s right now. And you’re incredibly excited. You can’t wait to start your PhD right after! Research has always been one of your BIG dreams.

But… what you don’t know is that a year from now, you’ll get pregnant. And the next, you’ll be holding your son tightly while trying to hold on to that dream.

You’ll keep hope alive, but your priorities will shift with this new season. At some point, you’ll face the quiet ache that it may not happen now. Then the deeper fear: what if it never does?

That seed will take root for many years, because you haven’t yet learned how to trust the timing of your life. Encase your plans in rubber, my love — never concrete. Because almost twenty years later, we’re finally in the middle of our PhD. We’re also 100% convinced we’re doing it at the best time of our lives!

The one thing you’re not is one thing

You’re a creative. A technologist. A researcher. An author. The list goes on.

You have incredibly diverse interests, each tugging at your soul for attention. And yet, you’ll spend years denying parts of yourself in favour of others, because the world has convinced you that you have to choose.

Our society isn’t yet designed for multi-passionate humans. You’ll feel lonely, sometimes misunderstood. You’ll even try to mute your most complex parts to make others comfortable.

But one day, you’ll find yourself working on projects that demand you fuse all those seemingly disparate aspects of your being. And you’ll realise: the only reason you can do this work… is because you let each of them live. 

That seemingly strange fusion? It becomes your most treasured superpower.

Don’t stay in your lane

I often muse with my husband about the world’s greatest sculptors who may never touch a piece of marble. It breaks my heart. 

We humans sit with so much undiscovered potential in our beings. Sometimes we’re not in the right environments. Sometimes we don’t have access to opportunities. But often, we don’t allow ourselves to explore beyond the realities we’ve inherited.

You’ll come to realise this eventually, my darling younger self, but right now, you’re waiting for permission - permission that will never come - to enter rooms that are already open to those who dare. 

Yes, some people will be thrown off when you switch lanes in service of a more complete soul exploration. They may not like it when you tear down the boxes they’ve carefully built for their own comfort.

But you owe it to yourself to fully become who you came here to be. That’s one of the best ways you can contribute to a better world.

Love should inspire you to be your greatest self

Oh, darling, you’re going to struggle with love. 

Your heart will break again and again, and you’ll often wonder if you’re worthy of a love that sees and honours who you are.

You won’t be perfect, either. There’s work you’ll need to do within yourself. 

But there’s a question you keep forgetting to ask when deciding whether to stay or go:

“Does this love inspire me to be my greatest self?”

Does it push you to grow? Does it ignite your dreams, even when they feel impossible? Is your life better because of this love? And is theirs?

Because it’s not just about you. Both of you should find that every year in this love has made you better than the last. 

We have that now. And I wish we’d known earlier that it was worth waiting for...

Your most meaningful friendships will blossom later in life

This is a big one, okay?

You’ve had different kinds of friends in varied seasons of your life. They each played a role, and many times they taught you lessons that hurt for a while. 

But here’s the thing (and stay with me)-  you don’t fully know yourself yet. 

You think you do. In fact, if I showed up in a time machine to tell you this, you'd probably flash that charming, know-it-all grin… and ask how I built the machine, because the rest wouldn’t register.

But a few years from now, as a young mother on a mission, you’ll be neck-deep in personality tests. MBTI. Journals and frameworks trying to name what you’ve always felt but couldn’t express. It will finally dawn on you: even if you had an inkling, you never had the language to explain who you were and what you needed to anyone. Friends included.

See, the very way it takes time to get to know other people, it takes time to get to know ourselves. But we take that for granted, inhabiting these bodies. We believe we know so much more than we do. That’s why you’ll say you want things, but act in contradiction. Why your own decisions might still surprise you.

But here’s the beauty: the closer you get to understanding who you are, the more easily you’ll recognise when your essence and values can meet someone else’s with truth and resonance.

And that’s when the friendships you’ve longed for will finally bloom.

Jeanelle Frontin is one of the authors featured at Black Creatives Aotearoa's Books and Beans stall this Saturday 24th May at Silo Park. The pop-up will feature signings, story time and new and pre-loved books by authors of African heritage.