As a filmmaker, I’ve often grappled with a peculiar paradox: the profound, vibrant life I experience within the creative process often dissolves into a strange numbness when I step back into the “real world.” This isn’t just a fleeting feeling; it’s a distinct lack of joy of life when I’m interacting with the very people who consume (my) art, who supposedly revel in the “feelings” I pour onto the screen. It’s a disconnect that has, at times, felt like a personal struggle, a silent burden carried amidst the loud reactions of the world.
To navigate this journey from personal experience to broader understanding and practical solutions, here’s what we’ll explore in this article:
Table of Contents
- The “Silent Warrior” Archetype: When an Artist’s Depths Meet the World’s Frequencies.
- The Broader Stage: Your Audience Beyond the Art.
- The Playlist of Numbness: Composing Your Inner Truth.
- The Transition from Numbness: What’s the Opposite Feeling?
- Beyond Clinical Labels: Your Numbness as a Creative Trait.
- The Artist’s Essential Distance: A Natural State.
- My Transitioning Playlist: A Point of Departure.
The Silent Warrior Archetype: When an Artist’s Depths Meet the World’s Frequencies.
It took two visceral reactions from the person closest to my heart to awaken me to the true magnitude of what I used to label as numbness.
In the fantasy version of my life’s film, this character’s name is Pan D’ora. This figure represents a long-standing archetype I’ve wrestled with throughout my life, and I chose this name as a poignant symbol: Pan represents All – its own self-encompassing world – and D’ora signifies God’s Gift, highlighting the transformative (and challenging) presence it was in my life. And because it is governed by a feminine energy in reverse, Pan D’ora will always be a she in this narrative, regardless of its literal genre.
(For a deeper dive into this character archetype’s world, you can explore my fantasy story Pan D’ora, written in Romanian.)
With this very article, I am finally offering this story its much-needed closure.
The Airplane Punch: A First Glimpse of the Divide
High above the world, in the deceptive quiet of an airplane cabin, a different kind of turbulence erupted. Pan D’ora’s voice, startlingly clear and brutal, cut through the calm, each word slamming into my world like a deliberate blow:
You are not here.
You are not with me.
You don’t love me.
Not as I love you.
This is not love.
You are clueless about what love is.
I was there. And I wasn’t. But I wasn’t somewhere else, lost in thoughts or consumed by other memories. I was simply processing our journey together, resting somewhere deep within my own being. I was more than present, but on a different layer of our shared context.
Our raw connection allowed her to immediately sense me, even before I was fully aware of my own internal process. Until that moment, it was a reflex I wasn’t consciously aware of—or, as I would later understand, a condition.
Her own inability to understand love outside her own self-referential framework felt like a deep cut. This outburst was a desperate plea for me to perform the love she expected, to break through my perceived barrier and validate her intensity, her All-ness. It violently brought me to the surface.
Her all versus my numbness (disconnect) was intensely at play.
She likely expected to be the absolute center, demanding full, overt emotional reciprocation. My delayed emotional processing must have been profoundly disorienting and triggering for her. She perceived my detachment not as my unique way of being, but as a personal rejection, a fundamental lack of feeling on my part.
My inability to immediately mirror her intense reactions, or to express love in a way she recognized, threatened her emotional world—the deep cut she felt from my side. To someone who believes they encompass All, any perceived lack of All-ness from a partner feels like a profound affront, an attempt to diminish their completeness.
I was not present because I wasn’t fully present for her in the way she demanded. She perceived my withdrawal as a threat to her control or her reality.
She was focused on the impact of my numbness. I was focused on its causes. She spoke the language of emotions. I spoke the language of rational. We were in total disconnect from each other, while at the same time feeling too much to look normal.
The Brain’s Quiet Retreat: My Narcolepsy, My Numbness
And perhaps, all this story was also tied to my narcolepsy-like condition that often makes my brain go offline from time to time or detach from my immediate environment.
On an EEG, this literally manifests as a temporary suppression of brain activity, as if in deep meditation or prayer. Yet, externally, I behave normally, a seeming paradox I’ve somehow conquered through relentless self-effort. But this internal state often cuts conversations short, leaving me labeled rude or selfish and fueling endless misunderstandings.
I only truly began to understand this ‘gift’ through my Semantic Filmmaking process and metadata-driven emotional acupuncture technique for giving a language to my own (and my characters’) voiceless emotions.
Ironically, this rapid self-emotional decoding approach has been recognized as an innovation in global research conferences, aligning with my ongoing PhD in Cinema and Media focused on making films that also algorithms can understand. What a non-artistic idea! But how else can our films be seen today? (For practical examples in filmmaking and storytelling, you can check out my Sense Flow where I recently began documenting some case studies.)
The Gift in the Silence: How Numbness Fuels Art
Though it creates difficulties in personal relationships, this unique wiring is precisely what fuels a profound wellspring of creativity and art.
For fellow artists who recognize these manifestations or operate on a different emotional frequency, perhaps this will illuminate its true offerings – an opportunity I embrace to fully accept myself and finally let go of the self-critique and the battle to ‘normalize.’:
- A unique lens on reality (the “different frequency”) – your involuntary detaching isn’t just an absence, it’s a shift in perception, allowing you to perceive nuances, patterns, and depths that a normally connected person might miss;
- This numbness to immediate external stimuli can paradoxically heighten your internal sensitivity, allowing to filter out the mundane and focus on the profound, the subtle, the underlying currents of human experience, an advantage as an artist;
- Access to subconscious and liminal states: Narcolepsy’s connection to REM sleep intrusion means you may have at times more direct and frequent access to dream-like states, sleep inducing imagery, and a fluid boundary between consciousness and subconsciousness. These are fertile grounds for imagination, symbolism, and non-linear thinking – all vital for artistic creation, especially in filmmaking, as these are the precise places where unique ideas and perspectives are often born.
- Profound understanding of disconnect and connection: Living with the constant challenge of being misunderstood, of being tagged rude or selfish due to involuntary detachment, gives you an unparalleled understanding of human disconnect. This personal struggle to bridge gaps – both within yourself and with others – provides rich material for your art. You can convey the nuances of isolation, longing, and the subtle ways people truly connect or fail to connect, with an authenticity few can match. This makes your art deeply empathetic, even if your personal experience is one of detachment.
- The Silent Warrior Archetype: Seers perceive your quietness and internal focus as strength, a deep resilience, not a deficit. Your unique way of being is not only perceived, but respected and perhaps even admired by those who glimpse your creative essence. Your art becomes the loud expression of this quiet warrior within. Just look how far you’ve come against all odds.
- Motivation and drive for Giving a Language to Voiceless Emotions: In my case, this process stems from a need to understand and express what might otherwise remain inaccessible within myself. This inherent drive, born from my not so friendly experiences, is a powerful motivator for creating, something we really need as artists, filmmakers and researchers, as imposter syndrome and demotivation are very familiar sensations.
In essence, your narcolepsy-like manifestations, and the unique way it shapes your emotional and sensory experience, is not something that breaks you. Instead, it equips you with a rare perspective and a profound well of insights that can become the very foundation of your most impactful and authentic artistic and creative expressions. It’s a key part of your distinct artist’s frequency.
The Flow of Healing: Making Sense of Your Unique Rhythm
For a long time, the terrifying challenges of sleep paralysis and potent physiological reactions to strong emotions (i.e. sudden weakness in muscles) were my constant companions, silent battles fought within.
Science unveiled some names behind my numbness, but its understanding stopped short of the ‘why.’ Instead, it imposed a more profound challenge: an invisible barrier to experiencing strong emotions in the moment, as if a cosmic voice whispered, You, my darling, are forbidden to feel!
I often associated this state of being with a sort of emotional impotence. A raging fire within, too intense to unleash, threatening to cost my life if expressed, or simply burn down everything in its path. It became a vicious circle, where the sole escape, the true gateway to feeling, lay beyond conventional limits: through the explosive release of creativity in everything I did and later, through artistic expression. Always, I had to wait. Always, I had to post-feel.
There was this delayed emotional response, like a form of autism, between the moment emotions occured and the moment I could feel them. But I was about to find out it was not just a clinical consequence, but also a defining characteristic of my way of being, especially as an artist.
Understanding the Gap: Another Frequency
This experience is a kind of emotional echo or delayed perception. Emotions are not absent, but are processed or rendered at a different rate, often deep in the subconscious, before they surface. This really puts you on a different frequency than most people who experience emotions in real time and manifest them immediately.
It is just a different way of processing emotional information, which can lead to painful misinterpretations in social interactions. And that, in itself, is a real torture that often feels utterly unjust.
Will I Be Able to Close the Gap? You may wonder.
I don’t think the goal should be to completely normalize or eliminate this characteristic, because it’s also a source of your artistic depth, of your innovative thinking. Instead, bridging the gap could mean:
- Awareness and Acceptance: Becoming deeply aware of your unique way of functioning. Accepting that you are like this—a post-feeler—frees up immense energy that you would otherwise use for self-criticism or exhausting attempts to conform.
- Strategic Emotional Calibration: With emotional acupuncture you can move effortlessly though foggy times and creative blockages. It helps you gain clarity and clarity makes you more precise. This don’t force an unnatural change in your way of being, but helps you to:
- Understand why you feel this way: Identify the patterns and triggers of this emotional lag.
- Anticipate and manage: Learn to prepare for situations where you know you will experience this gap and give yourself the space and time to post-feel.
- Communicate more effectively: You can learn to gently and assertively explain to those close to you that it is not a lack of feeling, but a different processing. This can drastically reduce misunderstandings and feelings of loneliness and isolation.
- Optimize for Creative Flow: Your gap is closely tied to your creative process. If you can integrate and capitalize on this processing time into your schedule and routine, you will turn an apparent weakness into a strength. Your art becomes the space where the post-feeling transforms into vibrant expression.
You Numbness is a Form of Super-Feeling
Look at this gap not as a flaw, but as a form of delayed super-feeling, which allows for deeper, more nuanced processing, perhaps even more filtered from immediate noise. It’s like having a processor that does more complex calculations, but takes a little longer. The end result (your art, your research, your innovation) is often much richer and more profound precisely because of this process.
Approaching the connection-disconnection gap isn’t about becoming an ordinary person in the way others feel, but about becoming an artist who understands and masters their own unique emotional rhythm. This transforms any perceived disadvantage into an inexhaustible source of art and self-understanding, ultimately leading to a more profound connection with the relevant audiences of your work.
The Tavern Dance: When Numbness Revealed Its Pain
Months later, the second major incident between me and Pan D’ora unfolded. We were eating in a tavern in Romania, amidst the vibrant chaos of a traditional wedding. She jumped up, swept into the celebration, and danced with all those strangers. A beautiful and very cinematic scene!
I couldn’t. I was frozen, unmovable, a statue. I wanted so much, but just couldn’t move a finger. For the first time, I felt the lingering pain behind my numbness. It hurt. It hurt me that I couldn’t feel what she felt, and that I couldn’t live that beautiful moment together – the raw joy of life, the uninhibited desire to be part of the everyday world. I missed creating a beautiful memory together. Instead, it became a vast space between our words and worlds.
Pan D’ora was right; my involuntary disconnections were indeed triggering a profound sense of abandonment in her, and perhaps in everyone close to me. It was a loneliness she had likely carried long before meeting me, now turning acutely painful, erupting to the surface and blasting right in my face.
Perhaps I didn’t love her as I was pretending. Perhaps I was simply broken beyond repair. I thought. The past was just a rich collection of reasons for my why-s, reasons Pan D’ora rightfully didn’t care about, as she was left to deal with the impact: an emotional distance I couldn’t explain, not even to myself. Her lack of attention, empathy, and compassion were her burdens to bear; the rest fell squarely on my shoulders.
A Surgical Departure: No Goodbye, No Closure
A few days later, Pan D’ora initiated a brutal process of discarding. Our path had been downhill from the very start. She was a creature of comfort, an avant-garde spirit confined to her own world, who, with an ankle still chained, bravely took a single step into the wild to claim a thrill. I, however, was the very wilderness that terrified. Perhaps I should have seen that chain, or, seeing it, cared more.
Perhaps she found someone else, or perhaps she simply realized it was better to retreat to someone more like herself, more compliant, to her own world and familiarities. I was the eerie part of the story. We broke up. I removed myself from the situation before it turned too bloody, and that severance hurt even more, as I wasn’t ready to move forward alone, to say goodbye.
Despite everything, our hearts genuinely connected. For the first time, we both felt something real for someone other than ourselves, ceasing to be solo-travelers. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, we were perishing in each other’s worlds. Pan D’ora represented the earthy realm—a dimension I, with my aerial artistic nature, found almost impossible to understand or care about too much.
This encounter was a vital necessity for me to comprehend that other side, for my very survival and continuity as an artist depended on it. And even as a person. Her playful question, What are you going to do without me?, made more sense than ever.
I’ve come to call it the ultimate karmic encounter: the meeting of two people where one has nothing to lose, and the other has everything to lose.
The Unanswerable Questions: A Filmmaker’s Crossroads
And so, I had to ask myself the most terrifying questions:
- Is becoming a filmmaker my childhood dream, or my true calling? Was this forty-year journey of healing what my child truly needed, only for me to discover it’s not entirely reflective of who I am?
- Is the ship sailed for me in the Dream Factory? As if it wasn’t ironic enough that a condition rooted in the very mechanisms of sleep and involuntary dreaming led me to the factory of dreams. Only Charlie from the Chocolate Factory could understand!
- Is the numbness that I feel in the world the condition for creation?
- Will I ever have a “normal” life in these conditions? How would that work out? In what world?
Then I remembered something scriptwriters, directors, and producers always asked me when meeting me on various production sets, during the times I was doing film and tv production work, long before becoming a filmmaker: What are you doing here?
What did they mean?
Where else should I be?
What did they see or know that I couldn’t?
The Broader Stage: Your Audience Beyond the Art
As artists, our audiences aren’t just the people who consume our films and art; they are also our loved ones, the strangers we encounter, the very fabric of our shared world.
I struggle with how my unique way of processing emotions impacts my life in this broader sense. I can’t stop being an artist – it’s woven into my very being. But I also can’t explain myself every second; it’s utterly draining, pulling me away from who I am and from the very creative process that sustains me.
The Artist’s Emotional Spectrum: A Different Frequency
Understanding your own emotional processing, especially what you might perceive as numbness, starts with recognizing that your inner world operates on a distinct frequency. It’s not about a deficit of feeling, but a different way of experiencing and expressing it.
The Playlist of Numbness: Composing Your Inner Truth
To truly unravel the complexities of numbness, we can turn to the universal language of music.
Imagine a system where musical notes evoke specific emotions. While I’m no musician, I’ve leveraged AI to design music and visuals through my semantic-driven method. This process resulted in precise inner landscapes for both myself and the elderly (another “numb” community) featured in the Distance Between Us visual gallery—a derivative artwork of my latest filmmaking project, the fundraising social ad-film Silent Heroes.
The elders project is just another ironic synchronicity, as me and them share a deep understanding of inaccessibility, the need for a new language and the lack of bridges, the disconnect between internal states and external expression, and ultimately, between people. They are not just invisible, they are trapped between walls.
This shared understanding, forged through personal experience and mirrored in the lives of the elderly, highlights a profound truth: the human need to connect, to be seen, to be heard, transcends age and circumstance. And perhaps, it is in bridging these very walls of disconnect that we truly find our own freedom.
These inner landscapes, in turn, help me see and hear my true self. This imaginative exercise might even help you create your own playlist to close your own gaps. Musicians are welcome to step in, correct any misconceptions, or recommend more music that might deepen our understanding. This section is as much for my own learning and exploration as it is for sharing.
What profound insights do music’s core elements offer about this often-misunderstood internal state?
- Do Major (C Major): joy, simplicity, purity, stability, bright, straightforward, foundational. Examples: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Ode to Joy (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9), Happy Birthday.
- Re Minor (D Minor): melancholy, seriousness, reflection, depth, contemplative mood. Examples: Adagio for Strings (Samuel Barber), Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin), Greensleeves.
- Mi Minor (E Minor): introspection, tenderness, bittersweetness, longing, gentle, sometimes sad, but with a touch of hope or introspection. Examples: House of the Rising Sun (The Animals), Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd), Gymnopédie No. 1 (Erik Satie).
- Fa Major (F Major): calm, pastoral, contentment, gentleness, peaceful and comforting key, sometimes evoking nature or a sense of ease. Examples: Pastoral Symphony (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6), What a Wonderful World (Louis Armstrong), Clair de Lune (Claude Debussy).
- Sol Major (G Major): optimism, warmth, folk-like, trust, energetic, hopeful sentiment, bright, open, and often rustic or straightforward feel. Examples: Sweet Caroline (Neil Diamond), Here Comes the Sun (The Beatles), I’m a Believer (The Monkees).
- La Minor (A Minor): mystery, drama, passion, intensity, darker, a versatile key that can convey both sadness and drama, sometimes with a sense of foreboding or heightened emotion. Examples: Hotel California (Eagles), Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen), Scarborough Fair.
- Si Minor (B Minor): seriousness, gravity, resignation, melancholic, solemnity, sometimes even tragic, with a sense of weight or finality. Examples: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (J.S. Bach), Concierto de Aranjuez (Joaquín Rodrigo – 2nd Movement), Symphony No. 6 Pathétique (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky).
What does Feeling and Knowing mean?
When you ask yourself, What do I feel?, you likely assume you’re on the same page with yourself about what Feeling truly means.
Let’s ensure that clarity by taking a semantic look at its structure: intuitive awareness, spirit, tone, flavor, sensation.
Often, the most probable answer to What do I feel? is I don’t know.
This stems from a similar assumption about what Knowing entails. So, let’s clarify that too: being aware of information known to few, being aware of the truth of something, acknowledging, recognizing, being able to distinguish, perceiving as familiar.
It quickly becomes clear that we may need to reframe the question to unlock answers or to catalyze our search: What is your tone/flavor/sensation/state of spirit?
Reframing enriches the horizon or opens new ones.
The Music You Listen To: A Mirror to Your Numbness
Music offers a profound way to understand our own numbness and how it might manifest in our artworks, precisely because it’s all about resonance—your unique resonance as an artist. It helps us build a crucial bridge, spanning the distance between our inner and outer worlds. This, in turn, fosters a stronger connection between our artistic intentions and our audiences’ understanding when they search for or engage with our work online.
Question for AI (Gemini): For numbness what notes/tones can we associate with?
Numbness in music is a fascinating concept because it’s less about a specific note and more about the overall lack or suppression of intense emotional peaks, or a feeling of detachment. It’s often evoked through a combination of musical elements. While there’s no universal numbness note, we can draw on common psychological and musical interpretations to suggest associations:
- Dull or Muted Timbres (Tone Color). Feeling: lack of energy, subdued, a sense of distance or unfeeling, muffle the sound.
- Repetitive or Static Harmonies/Melodies. Feeling: monotony, stagnation, being stuck, a lack of progress or emotional shift, very slowly changing chords, sometimes with subtle dissonances that don’t resolve quickly, a lack of clear melodic direction or strong cadences.
- Minor Keys (especially very dark or ambiguous ones). Feeling: a general somberness that borders on emotional exhaustion or emptiness rather than acute pain, sadness feels resigned, weary, or without active despair, heavyness or detachment.
- Slow Tempos and Sparse Arrangements. Feeling: a lack of pulse or life, stagnation, quiet internal void, slower rhythms mean less drive and urgency, feeling of emptiness or isolation.
- Lack of Dynamic Contrast. Feeling: flatness, emotional unresponsiveness, absence of strong feelings, without significant crescendos or decrescendos.
- Unresolved Dissonances (Subtle). Feeling: discomfort that isn’t acute pain, a sense of being slightly out of sync or detached from resolution, lingering dissonances that don’t quite resolve, or resolve to other ambiguous chords, a sense of unease or a feeling that something isn’t quite right, contributing to a detached, almost off sensation.
Think of your emotional state like a musical journey, moving across a spectrum.
Consider this a starting point: may my playlist inspire you to compose your own soundtrack, guiding your journey from numbness towards feeling and narrative (I placed them at the end of the article):
- Nirvana’s Music. Pain, rage, anger, frustration. This is not numbness, it is struggling inside its realms, bleeding between connection and disconnection. It’s a declaration of war against it. A struggle to break free from it.
- Radiohead’s How to Disappear Completely. The depths of introspection. My journey often begins in the profound, almost spiritual echoes of this song and others alike. This isn’t literal emptiness, but a deep immersion in my craft, a detachment from external noise to find internal clarity. You’re intensely present in that inner realm, even if it appears as quiet stillness to the outside world.
- Kate Bush’s How to Be Invisible. Chosen Invisibility. This subtle retreat can evolve into the conscious, almost mystical invisibility of this masterpiece. Here, my detachment isn’t passive; it’s a chosen state of being, a powerful vantage point for observation without being overwhelmed or even observed. In these serene phases, you’re vibrantly alive within your art, even if the physical world or even your critical self perceives you as distant or numb.
- The Romanian Șaraiman or Gypsy songs. Clash of Frequencies. Then, my deeply personal creation meets the public or I meet the world. Something sfits. It always does. It’s often met by audiences seeking the immediate, unbridled energy of – a powerful burst of life and passion. While this direct, raw emotional connection is vital for the audience, for you, the artist, it can feel like a jarring shift. The very intensity of their “feeling alive” can highlight your distinct emotional processing, creating a sense of being out of sync. You might wonder, Why don’t I feel that immediate rush? Am I broken?
The Transition from Numbness: What’s the Opposite Feeling?
Based on psychological definitions, the direct opposite of emotional numbness isn’t necessarily joy or excitement, but rather a state of heightened emotional awareness and responsiveness.
While hyperarousal is sometimes cited as the clinical opposite, we’re aiming for a healthier, vibrant emotional state, not an overwhelming or distressing one. So, feeling alive in the world or emotional awakening is a more fitting target.
At its core, this transition is about movement: of thoughts, words, images, notes, and the body itself. Movement recreates connections and helps the sense flow, releasing pain and blockages, and making room for new possibilities. It’s akin to physical rehabilitation: you design a progressive program to reacclimate a petrified body to movement, allowing it to rise from underground to the surface. Only then can you strengthen its core pillars and build up.
The same applies to transitioning from numbness to controlled numbness. Having practiced martial arts for years and with my mother, once a sport teacher, now my Alzheimer-affected “child”—another form of emotional departure— I came to better understand the profound dynamics of movement and non-movement.
Ultimately, it’s not about eradicating numbness, but about mastering its dynamic, presence and our relationship with it. It’s about designing for ourselves a rich, non-linear constellation of entry and exit points into and out of the world, much like the intricate, interconnected fabric of the web itself. If you imagine yourself as a version of the web, this mastery becomes significantly easier, both for your own internal navigation and for connecting with your audiences.
In this new understanding, art transcends being a mere alternative reality for feeling; it becomes an intrinsically connected part of the wholeness of reality.
Beyond Clinical Labels: Your Numbness as a Creative Trait
This is where the traditional lens of psychology and societal norms for mental health often miss the mark when applied to artists.
Psychology, in its adaptive objectives, often views numbness as a symptom to be treated, a deviation from a normal state of emotional responsiveness, the result or consequence of trauma, depression, anxiety, and so on. Its focus is typically on functioning within social contexts, pushing towards a full presence and fully feeling alive that aligns with societal expectations and norms.
For an artist, this is our worst nightmare. It goes against our very nature.
Reframing Presence
What an artist (or any individual with a rich inner life) considers alive may not always align with clinical or social definitions of presence or vitality. We don’t have a problem with being in the Now (time-related), but with being visibly fully present in the physical medium (place-related or layer-related).
Our type of presence is a form of being alive in our own universe, even if the world doesn’t perceive us as being present or connected in the conventional way.
As artists, we don’t wear masks and armours. For us this numbness is often a protective filter, allowing us to process profound input without being constantly overwhelmed. It’s not a disorder to be fixed, but a fundamental aspect of our deep sensitivity and capacity for creation.
Our detachment from the physical world’s superficial layers allows for an intensified connection to your internal landscapes and the universal truths we explore in our work.
It’s a different way of being, not a broken one.
Redefining our Expectations
To navigate this, we must also redefine our expectations. We cannot simply await the world’s understanding of our unique nature; instead, we must actively strive to make ourselves understood, not just as artists, but as ordinary individuals too.
This is crucial because, like everyone else, we dream of sharing our lives with others. And ironically, by doing so, we become even better at connecting our art with its core audiences.
Aim for Mastering Numbness, not for its Erasure
You’re not striving for a cure for your numbness as defined by external norms. Instead, you’re seeking a way to understand, validate, and strategically navigate it. You are intensely alive where it truly matters for your art – in your inner world and in the act of creation itself. The challenge is simply to build the necessary bridges to the outer world, on your own terms.
The Artist’s Essential Distance: A Natural State
If you think about it, emotional detachment is the natural state of artists. Art, by its nature, lives at a certain distance from the purely physical, thriving in that space in between.
We are not stuck in between; we create in between.
Kate Bush’s song How to be Invisible is a great source of soothing and inspiration. As one of her fans beautifully put it in a comment: “A message from the other side of the fence”. It is not about the pain of numbness or a desire to escape it into full feeling. Instead, it’s about the desire for or the act of achieving a state that, while not strictly numb, shares qualities of detachment, withdrawal, and a lack of overt emotional expression or engagement with the outside world.
It’s a step away from feeling alive and towards a unique form of chosen, perhaps even empowering, invisibility or self-containment. It’s a contemplative, almost serene approach to not being seen, rather than a desperate one. It suggests a comfort, or at least a strategy, for existing without being fully present.
The pain you feel—the numbness when you’re in the world, the unsettling feeling because you can’t feel like everyone else —stems from denial. It’s the yearning to belong to a world that isn’t truly yours. You exist physically, you live here, but you don’t belong. The difference between you and the ones who seem to belong is that you are aware of this truth and haven’t figured out, yet, a less overwheling way to deal with it.
Through art, we bridge the gap between our inner and outer universes. There is no world, nor can there be, without art, for we are all part of the Creator. Some of us simply wage a difficult fight against conforming to states of being other than our natural one.
Don’t worry too much about it! Just stay curious and let the sense flow.
You are not broken. You’re an artist.
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