at home in the world as my artist self
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this is my last chapter of sharing my wayfinding journey (for now) — in which I share how I stopped traveling, decided to make a home in Istanbul, and slowly learned to show up as my artist self — in relationship, and in the world. I’ll untangle:
why I clung onto hermitude, and resisted being in relationship for so long
what I had to let go of: emotional storms + binary thinking
what I was afraid of (regression, and losing myself)
a “what if” that unlocked everything for me
choosing to show up as my uncompromising artist self
a slow emergence of philosophies and processes
this episode is about integration, metamorphosis, and the act of returning to the world — and allowing myself to be seen.
text transcript
In the last episode, the wandering way of an artist's hermit, I talked about the metaphor and the physical parallel act of leaping into the void.
How just before the pandemic started, I left my home in New York City and with it, the creative hustle -- for a life of slow traveling around the world.
I learned to deprogram myself from all the inherited shoulds of how to be a creative on the internet.
And instead, I practiced living without plans, instead with presence and creating work without expectations or pressure, without a voice in my head telling me what I should be doing.
I learned how to make art in the void.
And in doing so, I found an inexhaustible fuel and reason, a power source within me for making art, even if no one ever saw it.
Slowly, I formed my website philosophy, a website as a vessel, a home for all of my creations and energy, living on the internet even as I physically was traveling in motion.
Today is the final chapter of sharing my wayfinding story in which I'll take you to the present moment.
And I'm so relieved to be honest because talking about these last 10, more than 10 years, starting from the beginning of episode two, it really wasn't easy.
And I just wanted to talk about philosophies and processes and frameworks for how to be to share my vision, but I couldn't skip over it.
I couldn't skip over the struggles, the suffering that went into the journey because as I mentioned in episode two, I think it's so crucial to ground shared values and ethos and visions in a lived embodied experience, in a sense of having walked the path and been a human throughout walking this path instead of some disembodied voice of wisdom, which I don't claim myself to be at all.
This chapter will be about metamorphosis, integration, and returning to make a home in the world.
finding a home - and resisting it
At the end of traveling for almost two years, I was absolutely exhausted.
After moving constantly, the act of moving no longer feels novel.
It's kind of like an object in motion always wants to stay in motion.
As an immigrant child of diaspora, I always believed that home was something that lived inside of me in my mind and my creations, in my website.
But after multiple existential crises while traveling, I found myself seeking a sense of physical material home.
I felt a calling to settle, at least for now, in Istanbul, which I describe as a watery ancient city with soul and deep feeling, a liminal city, literally across two continents, somewhere between East and West, and yet neither.
There's that mythology of Istanbul that I was so drawn to, and the reality of it was that when I arrived, I was in the middle of some emotional abyss.
It felt like in its chaos, the only place that was deep enough to hold me, kind of like falling into a well.
And within a few weeks after arriving, I met the man that would become my current partner.
I found a sun-filled apartment overlooking the Bosphorus, and a few months later, I met a dog at a cafe who was looking for an owner.
That first year, I spent alternating between this easy, effortless happiness with spikes of intense panic, anxiety, disbelief, and deep resistance.
Stability wasn't a comfortable state for me.
I think my nervous system was used to constant crisis, and the instability, the adventure, the addiction of riding emotional waves.
Over the course of a year or two, I experienced this slow breaking down of psychic defenses.
I learned how to rest, and I panicked, and I could feel that I was on a bridge to the next version of myself, where a sense of full-hearted commitment and loyalty to a material and emotional groundedness was the next version of myself, the next version of my life waiting for me.
I could feel that there was something in me that wanted to commit to a partner, to a dog, to a new life, to a relationship with otherness, with the world, with a sense of vision and purpose that was greater than my present moment emotional realities.
letting go of emotional storms & binary thinking
I think in this journey of metamorphosis, there were two things that I really had to learn how to let go of.
One was the addiction to emotional storms, and the other was dichotomy of either or thinking.
So I had a pattern of riding emotional storms through constant change, constant struggle and discomfort, unhealthy romantic dynamics, unhealthy sort of guilt to work.
There was a part of me that was comfortable in these storms.
It was as if I was using them to distract my creative energy from building something with a more lasting foundation, probably because I was afraid of lasting foundations.
The other thing that I had to learn to let go of was the rigid dichotomies that I put up to protect my hard-won sense of true essential self.
What I mean by that is a sense of stability, I sort of pegged that as oppressive.
And instead I wanted to be in a state of fluid change.
It was as if a life of committed responsibilities, a home, a partner, a dog, a settled life.
I put that in a dichotomy with absolute personal freedom, with the energy to focus completely on my art and on myself in the creative wild.
It was a dichotomy between obligations to others versus the freedom to be myself, to be alone.
It was the dichotomy of community versus hermitude and solitude.
And also the dichotomy between money versus art.
It was a sort of either or thinking.
Like I couldn't have both.
I had to choose.
And reflecting on where this comes from, I think it's growing up in a culture of compromise and sacrifice, the idea that to have a steady paycheck, you must compromise your full self.
And in the past, a feeling like I was forced to make a choice, now I was on the other side of this choice.
I thought I would always choose fluidity and change and freedom and self and solitude and loneliness and art.
And in the process, I had to give up stability and responsibility and relationships and community and money.
a fear of losing myself
I think I was afraid of losing myself.
I was afraid of losing this soulful artist self that I had worked so hard for, endured so many dark nights of the soul to find.
I was afraid of corrupting her again with the demands of the world, with obligations, with intimate relationships, with the pursuit of worldly things, like money or ambition or prestige or accomplishments.
The dissolution of this dichotomy that I had set up, it happened in parallel, my personal life and my work life.
One informed the other.
I was experiencing this easy, peaceful happiness and I was resisting it at the same time.
And I realized the resistance came from this false dichotomy.
And I started asking myself, what if these two things that I desire weren't in conflict?
What if I could have both?
What if it wasn't being a kite floating around in the universe, but being grounded to a sense of home, a sense of self, and that home being inextricably intertwined with committed relationships?
What if commitments and responsibilities didn't erode my sense of self, but actually infused it with deeper meaning and purpose?
What if cultivating my artistic, creative, inner wealth, inner worlds, could bring me material wealth, which I could then do something with in the world?
What if I could have both?
What if the key to bothness was to embrace the extreme duality of either, to live in freedom of self and deep commitment to other?
In other words, I think I learned to stop fighting.
I learned to stop being in a constant battle of me versus the outside world, me versus my upbringing or programming.
And I asked myself, what if I could be my true self in everything that I did, in my relationships, in my work, in my work relationships?
What if it was actually the key to my next evolution?
I think after my artist hermit years, I was afraid to return to the world because I was afraid of regression, but actually it was a call to know that the treasures I found couldn't be lost, only more deeply integrated and lived and embodied into my bones.
I think my deepest desire was always to express my artistic creative essence at full 100% flow.
And I thought this desire was at odds with external obligations, but over time I realized that the invitation was to bring my full artistic self to everything that I did, client work, making money, business, marketing, sales, all the things that I believed I had no expertise or no power in doing that.
I should step aside and listen to the marketing experts, the sales experts.
I think unconsciously I created boundaries around my artist self to help keep her safe from the pressures of the world.
But I realized that her presence was the key to everything.
She was my core creative energy source.
an artist in the world
I couldn't isolate her and cloister her in an ivory tower to protect her from the world, from the structures that she escaped from, capitalism, patriarchy, prestige, security, elitism, the matrix, I had to become her, integrate her into me, allow her to take up space within me and in the world.
She needed to be in the world, not separate from it.
She needed to be the one who could rewrite and reinvent what's possible.
And for her to be in the world, at home in the world, I had to trust her instincts.
I had to trust her to lead the way forwards and to trust that she would be safe and she could keep me safe.
This realization, it happened very, very, very slowly.
It was like a slow dissolution of dichotomies and rigid self defense boundaries that I had put up around my personal life that once it came down, the wall that I had put up between my artist self and in the world self also broke down and everything just kind of integrated.
And that commitment, that decision to be my full uncompromising self in everything that I did, it is what emerged many of the philosophies and processes I have today...
around art and money, around being an artist entrepreneur as embodying the creative self in service to the world, around the importance of process over product, around the multi-dimensional infinite creative self that we can give space for on the internet and in our own material lives, around the website as home, as a space, as an infinity space to hold a sense of home for our creative energy, around the concepts of energetic reciprocity and everything that we do in the giving and receiving in the form of creations and services and offerings and receiving in the form of relationships, energy and money and world building as the creative process which integrates everything.
I'm still in this continual process of understanding what it is that I believe and how I want to allow those visions to take up space in the world.
end notes, and what's next
Thank you, creative friends, for following me back here to the present moment, to the end and the beginning.
Over these last five episodes, I told you the long saga of how I got here, each chapter was like several years, this still down into 20 minutes.
From being inside the programming of the world to resisting it and fighting it to falling through the threshold, to being in the void of myself, to returning, integrating, metamorphosizing into my truer self to show up in the world again and share what I have to offer.
And now that I've told you the process that I went through in becoming my philosophies, I can start to articulate and explore and unpack them further, the vision that I have for art and the internet.
And if I sound at all cohesive or calm or wise, I just wanna remind you that I don't have the answers.
I only have a journey of lived experiences and that journey is always ongoing.
There's endless paths to whatever your destination might be.
And I think it's really important to understand that.
We can never follow someone else's journey or solutions.
We always have to make them our own.
I think as a guide, my deepest desire is to help you be a guide for yourself.
My goal is to open up more questions and possibilities, ways that can help you attune to your own inner compass that can help you make the journey truly your own, to give you permission to be your own guide in the wilderness that is yourself.
💌 I write a weekly newsletter on creative alchemy & world-building called guide.notes.