Begin Before You Believe

“Ehkä mä olen vaan kuntoutuva opiskelija. Ja taiteilija-identiteetti on deluusiota, jäänteitä suuruudenhullusta ‘minun on oltava joku’ -tarpeesta.”
(entry, November 9, 2015)

Lesson 3: Begin before you believe. The identity will catch up.

I was halfway through a decade-long detour.
Not lost exactly, but not found either.
I wrote in notebooks. Attended Latin classes. Sketched out a novel that might never exist.
And through it all, I kept circling the same question:
Am I really this thing I’m trying to become?

Artist.
Writer.
Creative professional.
Not yet. Not quite. Not convincingly.

There was always some counter-voice.
The one that said I was too old. Too late. Too scattered.
That my ambitions were compensating for irrelevance.
That no real artist would second-guess themselves like this.
That “career change in two steps” was just a nice slogan for someone who had run out of options.

Still, I returned to the page.
I chose courses that made me feel awake.
I imagined books not for the market but for myself.
I chose not to perform interest in things that no longer moved me.
And slowly — almost imperceptibly — the identity began to arrive. Not as certainty, but as gravity.

Lesson 3 is this:
Do not wait to feel like a writer before you begin writing.
Do not wait to feel like an artist before you start shaping the world.
Do not wait to be believed by others before you believe in the thing you’re trying to become.

Start anyway.
Build in the dark.
Let your body move before your title does.

The mind will resist.
The world will raise an eyebrow.
But the mythology will begin to form in the doing.

Begin before you believe. That’s where the myth begins.