You Have To Find Your Way Back Into Your Own Story.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Creative Life — the podcast about what it really takes to build a life in the creative arts: the struggles, the breakthroughs, and the hard-won frameworks that keep us moving forward.
This is the first episode I’ve made in some time. And there’s a reason for that. About a year ago I walked away almost entirely from content— this podcast, YouTube, Instagram — because I realised I was talking about my journey more than I was living it. Today I want to tell you the story of what happened since I made that decision.
If you’re a creative who senses that the life you’re living has perhaps drifted from the one you set out to make, I really think you’ll find a lot that resonates in this podcast.
So here are some of the things I’ll be diving into.
Why I stopped drinking last year — and how giving up alcohol doubled my energy at a time when every day counts.
How stepping away from content sent me somewhere I never expected: that is into building a solopreneur business and releasing my first product.
And the price of refusing to release my album into the digital void — the collages, the diaries, the book that grew out of control, and the night at Mahalla that tore up my voice and my plan.
I don’t know if we ever really arrive in the future. But we can make it different from the path we assumed we were on.
Let’s dive in.
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I entered the office today and I felt, suddenly and very powerfully, something that I haven’t felt for a long time: the desire to communicate.
By communicate, I mean to speak to you — or who ever my “audience” is or is not.
Now this might seem paradoxical, as of course, I write this newsletter every week.
But there is a difference between how communicate our story, and how we speak to our audience.
I write this newsletter for two reasons. First to process whatever creative challenge I am facing. And second to share what I learn with you, and — I hope — to give you value.
In the packaging of a newsletter — even an honest one, which this is — life becomes neat.
And when I arrived today, I found myself feeling extraordinarily restless. It wasn’t a bad feeling, in fact, quite the opposite.
It felt that an old energy was awakening. Hmm, or at least knocking somehow on the door.
What was it I thought?
And then I realised. It was the restless energy of creation — pure and unbridled, and — I think — a little unsure of what to do with itself.
But I liked it, to feel burnished by that restlessness, to feel the certain violence of an energy unwilling to restrain.
Damn, just to feel that energy is so connecting to life.
I feel the in the grip of very many conflicting forces, and the strange thing is that I am not ready for this energy. I am still in the midst of an extended period where I feel I am doing deep internal work.
The energy, I think started overflowing, because I think some latent part of me knows that — at the right given time — this period must draw to a close. Like a ship perhaps that catches its first glimpse of shore after long away.
Today then, simply, I want to share some of the colours of my life. What I am working, some pain points, some dreams. Ideas and reflections too. I share them in the spirit of someone who is certain they are in pursuit of too many things, but who cannot help but be in the pursuit, because, deep down, I know that it is the pursuit itself that is life. And as long as I feel that life pulse surging in me, I know that something is good and right — even if my tactical approach to life is amiss, is awry. But then again, I am, for better or worse a creative. And it is my way that, not matter how I try, I chase dangling threads, while knowing I am lunatic to do so.
Here is a jumbly overview.
1/ A Year Off Alcohol
I start with this because it is important for me to say that the last year has derived from an inflection point in my life. I arrived at this point where I felt that no matter what I did, I felt that I couldn't quite move my life forward in the way that I wanted to. I know that many of us struggle with this feeling. I lost a friend a few years older than me in 2024, and it hit me like a hammer. Not just to lose him, but because I understood so deeply what drove him from this world. There is nothing more precious than life, and my God, it is the most serious business. We have to look after ourselves, and we have to look after those we love. Personally, I felt the weight of so many things that I both still wanted to do, but also that I felt I should already have done. As if I was existing in a future that I had not planned for carefully enough. I say this with the deepest knowledge — now more than ever — of all the blessings of my life. But equally, I wanted to make a concerted stand for who it was I felt like I could be — who I still felt like I could become. And I felt like life was asking me the toughest question: what am I willing to do to do that.
When you stare that in the eye long enough, it quickly throws a spotlight on the immediacy of your choices. Simply put, I felt I could make not just better micro choices, but that the human who was making those choices could bring a better energy to it. And life for me is energy, and we, we are simply the evocation of its cadence. So I asked myself this question: am I serious enough about becoming who I want to be that I am willing to change my life? And so, I decided to pack in alcohol, cigarettes and any other toxins that might be floating around in Berlin. That decision didn't change my life, but it has doubled my energy at a time when every single day matters to me. I may write a newsletter specifically going deeper into this (drop a comment if you'd like) — but
the take away I would share is that if you are feeling you are not quite where you want to be in life, what really matters is not wanting to get where you want to go. It is about what you are willing to change — and sacrifice — and right now — in order to start moving towards it in a new way. My tactical advice? Start by making a hard change, and don't let any comments from anyone hold you back. Your living potential is where your gift lives, and it is your duty to life to find it, and then serve it as a gift you give back to life itself.
2/ I Gave Up Content
Back in 2023, I decided — after feeling all the ambiguity so many of us feel about social media — that I was going to start learning the language of the modern world, and try to figure out all this content stuff.
There are many things that I greatly enjoyed about starting a podcast and giving YouTube a go. I especially love sharing what I learn, and documenting my own story as it unfolds. However, what I wasn’t quite prepared for was a certain erosion that comes when you start practising the consistency that you need to have to progress on these channels. And I did well with that consistency — my podcast charted several times in the Apple Charts, my Substack has grown to nearly 4000 subscribers, even if YouTube tortured me somewhat. However, what I struggled with was that the expression of the path felt like it was somehow flattening the chapter that I found myself within. I had the idea with YouTube that I would really try to share with great transparency the journey of recording my still unreleased album Chromatic Zero. Yet trying to burrow into the dungeon where the demon of my own writing block lay sat so uneasily with my effort to speak about the journey. As I got into 2025, I found myself suddenly feeling like I had become more of a content creator than an artist, and found myself latched to a treadmill that I had never consciously decided to get on. And then I hit a wall in myself. I was speaking about my journey more than living my journey, and worse, I felt that I had totally dried up in terms of my musical development. I had hit a wall, and I had to face up to the question whether my musical life was dead. Everything that has happened since, has — in some way — been about trying to answer that question.
3/ I Started a Solopreneur Business
I paused the content side of my life entirely — Instagram, Podcast & YouTube — and with it gave up alcohol. All I knew was that I had to carve serious space out of myself and life if I was to get back to my own story. My freelance work in film and photography went okay in 2025, but two things were happening. First, the economy had tanked and AI had hit. There was less work out there. On top of it, I had been doing it since 2013, I didn’t have the same hunger. So rather than starting to chase work that was drying up, I decided instead I’d take the work that came, but start doing something new. I’d had the vague idea for years to start a solopreneur business, but had never taken the leap. Then in January, I had more time on my hands than I’d had for years, I started trying to figure out ways to solve some of the things I’d been feeling. I knew that content was how the world worked, and I knew that as an independent artist, at some stage, I’d have to start leaning into it again. But I didn’t want to do it as I’d been doing it before. So I started with my very own pain point. I was still writing my weekly Substack, but felt really really dissatisfied with two things. First, I would spent all that time writing this essay, but would never effectively carve out the ideas to put into either social media or Substack Notes. I tried using AI but it was so galling — it would just mangle the writing. So I worked incessantly on creating my own platform for Substack that would help me promote my creative life, without stealing all the time that I had needed for doing what my bigger purpose was — which was to get ALOT better. It was from this The Substack Workstation was born, and — irony of ironies — I had created a tool using AI that was specifically designed to tamper the worst of AI. It transformed my workflow, and I realised that it was something that could help others too. And so I started I started a whole new, and unexpected journey, of working out how to bring a product to market. What I didn’t expect was how much going into business would teach me, and I feel that when I release my next work artistically, I have so many new tools with which to grapple with this modern world, hyper in flux as it is (if you’d like to hear more about the tools that I’ve learnt about, please drop a comment!)
4/ I Rejected 100% Digital Releases
The most unexpected aspect of my current journey artistically is that I remembered the extent to which I am old fashioned artist. Platforms like Spotify have cheapened my experience to my own music — and I reject entirely the model it is built upon outright. Art is something that matters, and I think that as an artist, you have to work out how to fucking stand for that. The act of attempting to stand for that has — in private — nearly driven to insanity. But this is the road that I am on, and this is the story that I have been living and not communicating openly. My issues is less about Spotify and the enshittification of everything. It is much more about me — what is it that I want to offer? How can I express my values? What am I willing to stand for. And I have realised that its not just about the art and the meaning baked into it. It is also a matter of presentation. Because art is about story, and sorry — who the hell knows anything about the story of a song or an album. People don’t know the names of the song anymore. They don’t know the names of the album it belongs to. Hell, they don’t even know the name of the artist. I can’t fight the way this aspect of our culture has been eroded by Spotify, TikTok and the internet. But I can choose to represent something differently in my own art. And it is that that I am aiming at. Yes, it makes me pompous. Yes, it has driven me to the end of myself. Yes, nothing is finished or release. But equally — YES — it has helped me find my way back to my story.
5/ “Chromatic Zero” Cloned Itself
So after mixing and mastering my album I set about — as you do — to try to get some artwork made. However, nothing quite fitted. After coming to a dead end with the last artist, I realised that I was the only one who could create it. I knew that its story was too set in my own life to give it to another. And yet equally, I had to pretences to be a visual artist. But I had to try, and so months of work began on making collage from all the visual images I’d recorded during my year working and sometimes living in Berlin’s iconic Arts Community Mahalla. And then, as I worked on it, I started reading back my diaries from writing the album, and so started trying to integrate these into the vinyl itself. This of course was wildly ambitious and with every day the book seemed to grow till, at last, the potential cost of printing it escalated so much that there was simply no way to do….much as it tickled the Howard Hughes in me. That said, I had gone too far down the rabbit hole to find my way back, and so called my dear friend Lucas Dietrich, whom, for the last 6 months I have also driven to the point of madness. But we have now — finally — completed what has become a visual book to accompany the album…complete with diary excerpts, collages, photos and with Mahalla as its backdrop. But then…
6/ Oh God, I Started Writing a Book
The thing was, when I was started reading my diaries, the text was so abstract, primal and mythic in its imagery, that I felt hat I needed to better present the actual story of the album in the image book. And so I started adding my memories to the diary entries, and of course, this then started seizing me with the zest of the Kraken too. I don’t know what the hell happened, but I started looking back at this beautiful, painful, lonely year fighting for my musical life in 2024, and it started flooding out of me. It felt like a story worth telling, or at least, it was a story that I had to exorcise out out me. The thing was that my hopes to tour the album were torn apart by managing to do in my vocal chords one desperate night in February in the cold at Mahalla. God know what the void outside heard, but that night something happened that I find hard to explain. All I know is that I beat my own demon, as if once and for all I drove him back into the underworld. But as I did, I tore into a last take of the song I was recording and I knew something bad had happened. I don’t know at all where this leaves me, or my dream to do something with all this I have been working on these years. All I know, deep down in my heart, is that I just have to complete it. I have to complete the two books to go with the album. And I do it without expectation, without even hope. Making it all has taken chunks out of my life, my soul and my body. But I just know that I have to make it. Not for any reason other than it must be made, and it won’t leave me alone until its done. Maybe my dream to playing again is not meant to pass. And maybe I’m pouring some of the sadness of my own life in my need to complete the triptych. But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels rather, that I am in the process of reclaiming my life, for better or worse, for good or bad. Whatever in me that needs to complete or be completed by this journey is before me, and I must pursue it no matter what price it is the devil must take has his fee.
You Have To Find Your Way Back Into Your Own Story.
I write all this when arriving tonight, I felt at some type of juncture. I don’t know if we ever arrive in the future. But we can make the future different to the path we had assumed we were on. I am in a time which Nietzsche would describe as “light and fire”. I feel that I am winning my own battle with the demons I have wrestled the last years. Demons of feeling incomplete, sometimes not enough, or that worrying I will never fulfil the potential I once inkled inside myself as a young man. Within the tumult, I feel I am with the heart of my life. I can feel its pulse, how my arteries still bulge in trying to be equal to the opportunity we are given. In a world that seems to have given itself the pithiness of content, my story is has returned to the purpose I always set out with — to make my own stand for lasting things, that is to Schopenauer called the great “eye of Art”. I think of how the Gods obliterated poor Kafka, and how desperately he tried to live up to his own gift, despite the ways the world and his own health ganged up so furiously against him. We must all make our own stand. A stand for our own values. For our own heart. For the ridiculous dream that we can contribute our gift and that it can somehow help, somehow matter. I look up at the post it notes on my wall in front of me. Notes of someone pursuing something with the tangled belief that such things as individual chasing artistic pursuits matter. “Courage” one says. Another tells me “Everything is possible”. The next instructs “Do Hard Things.” Ways that we try to give ourselves guidance when we know the version of us who arrives tomorrow at the studio may not be as strong as the one who is here today.
This will be a podcast I think the first for some time. It may the last too. I have to finish a book for a publisher I may never have. And then forge a business that is early in its inception. And then prepare my filming work for Berlin’s art week next week. There are overlapping versions of life ahead, and each shall continue to take bites out of the other. But you know what? Altogether, they make for my story. And its simply that that I share tonight, hoping that it may somehow help you on yours. Because if there’s one thing I know it is this:
You Have To Find Your Way Back Into Your Own Story.
