I have been focused on finding my way out of the overwhelming fear I feel when it comes to love. It is unbearable at times. My trauma is the color which I’m painting the present with. Until its all covered in a dense, oily, black texture, suffocating my sense of reality. It’s all blurred. The past, present and the future. A confusing mix of time, painful memories and cruel fantasies. What is real? And what is a memory of a future?

I know this is a crucial point in my life. This is where I’ll either make another mistake, like the continuation of my old repertoire – falling in love and letting love destroy me until I leave it and look for another love to destroy me in a new way. A different way. Or, this is where I am a pioneer – a rebel, who’s refusing to go where the pain feels familiar and welcoming. This is where I am in control, where I have the power to create whatever I want, instead of letting life create situations and traps for me where I feel helpless and lost. I refuse to be a guest in my own life again. It’s such a humiliation to victimize oneself like that. You abandoned yourself, you abandoned life and in the end, you abandoned your sense of control, until your perception of the world is so flat and dry that it looks and feels like a box, with nothing inside. I’ve been trapped in my own coffin a number of times. Death is only an unbearable concept when it happens while you are still breathing. It’s absurd how easy death can replace life without any warning. How it’s the perfect doppelganger for life – dressed up in routines, boredom, numbness, indifference and self deception. The real death is when you lose yourself. I’ve died so many times.

Life, is a place where you constantly find yourself. Every day. It’s sad how our self images are shattered at some point in our childhood, and we are forced to spend the rest of our lives trying to find the pieces and putting ourselves back together again. Most likely we will not succeed. We will always feel like some pieces are missing. Perhaps even the most important pieces. That’s life’s cruelest joke. We are born naked in the world, and to ourselves where our only identity is vulnerability, but from that day, our nakedness will always be hidden behind shame, guilt or fear. The vulnerability will be considered as a weakness. We will do anything to suppress our true nature. And the irony is that our biggest, most frustrating hobby – is trying to create another, vicarious identity to replace the one we rejected at some point.

Most likely, we will try to buy that identity, or least the sense of it. We can choose to be whoever we want to be – it’s just a matter of finding the right costume and make up, attitudes, values, things, goals, achievements, lifestyles and the fulfillment they’re supposed to create inside our shattered selves.

To find our identity by looking at our own true nature is very difficult when everything in modern society is based on the idea that you are supposed buy it instead. You want to be a popular person? Just follow the rules of beauty and success. You want to be a rebel? Just follow the political concept of a criminal or an activist. You want to be adventurous? Just visit a lot of countries around the world or buy a session of bungyjump, car racing or whatever experience you want.

And if you should fall in love, there is a pre- made package for you to buy – a modern relationship with certain routines, dreams, sensations, achievements and goals to follow. And when you still don’t feel happy, sexually satisfied or emotionally and spirituality fulfilled, you will numb it and surrender to the idea that this is what life is, that it’s all you are gonna get out of it. And then you make peace with it all, and stop looking for the missing pieces – the missing pieces of your perception of love, life, happiness, pleasure, life and yourself. You replace the purpose of your existence with a feeling of being content enough to maintain a healthy life.

Artists, musicians, writers, poets and actors know that there’s magic in life. Magic that you can create with your mind, your emotions, your inner stories and the multiverse of our inner worlds. Magic you don’t buy, but create from scratch. Something that you bring into the world, something you decorate and highlight reality with. Something magical that didn’t exist before you created it.

Since it’s so hard to find the missing pieces we lost in our childhood, we create them in our art instead. These creative expressions are painfully genuine and works as a public reminder of our own missing pieces – that is what makes art into magic.

And we can do this outside the canvases, instruments, papers and the studio. We can create magic in anything we want – in life, love, sex and within ourselves. But it takes a lot of courage and effort because society is putting a big pressure on us to not do this. To break free from the pre made packages, the numbness and the comfortably uncomfortable or perhaps the other way around, the already thought out ideals, values, sexual orientations and attitudes, the faked pleasure, happiness and fulfillment – the lost dreams and the failed sense of identity. Being OK with life in a box, with nothing but every day routines inside and everything else outside it.

I can’t do that. I feel more scared of being emotionally numb than I am scared of death. I will create magic in my life, in every way I can. Especially in love and sex. I am already creating magic with my art so I have proved to myself that I’m able to do it.

Now, I just have to keep experimenting with life, love, sex in the same way.

I won’t ever surrender, not even to the magic, I want to find more, look further, go beyond. This is what I want out of life. And it’s not for sale.