The few moments in my life where I’ve felt unstoppable have been seared into my memory because of how powerful I felt in those times. It’s the casual air of quiet confidence that I hangs around superheroes or very dedicated craftspeople. I find that the feeling is heavily tied to a skill or craft that you can feel ownership and proficiency in. The confidence is and limitless energy is a natural consequence of the captivation of your whole essence of being. The moment that your body fully gives in to the raw drive to explore this area is when you feel like you can do anything. It’s the moment that your internal locus of control expands to infinity, like when you get the star in MarioKart—there’s nothing, no one that can stop you from achieving your dreams and realizing your vision.
I watched the first episode of Blue Period an anime airing this season about a high school student who discovers art as his passion. This student undergoes an existential crisis where he must resolve his inner conflict with being responsible to his duties as well as his internal definition about what he’s allowed to like doing (notably art is not while drinking and watching a sports game is) and induling his newfound passion towards creating art. There’s one moment that is incredibly relatable in the episode where he notes how beautiful Shibuya is under the morning light to his friend, and his friend responds by poking fun at him, not connecting to the same emotion. Later, he draws this scene and is moved to tears when his friends actually make the connection with his painting to their early morning exploring the streets of Shibuya after a night of heavy drinking.
I imagine that every creative experiences this journey towards becoming comfortable and confident in expressing their passion without restraint and becoming hooked onto that moment of resonance, when a piece of your mind made real is the basis of deep connection with others, especially those close to you. Yaguchi describes that moment as the first time he had a “real” talk with his friends (I’m sure there’s some lost in the translation to English subtitles here). It’s realer than the normal conversation you have in the sense that connecting with someone’s creation is an intensely intimate process. It takes out the middleman of language that we usually rely on to get to know someone, and you’re able to understand someone through an unspoken language. For me, creating is as much about the chaotic frenzy of manifesting something imagined into reality as it is about that magical moment of resonance, when someone else relates to your creation. I’m addicted to that indescribable feeling of intimacy, where someone can speak about your work as part of themselves. It’s both incredibly gratifying and almost unbelievable that a true, pure part of yourself becomes a piece of someone else through the medium of your creations. That’s how I view my relationship to creating: it’s as much about discovering how to express myself more authentically and freely as it is creating gateways for others to visit a room of my core being.
This is the 66th installment in my experiment of publishing raw, lightly edited mini-essays every day towards achieving 100 public pieces. Check out the rationale and the full list here.