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I forced my bag into the overhead locker, much to the frustration of the building line of people behind me. I thought of turning around, looking my fellow passenger in the eye and saying something abrasive about how the flight won’t leave any faster than the departure time stated on the boarding pass. Of course, I didn’t. Maybe they would read my body language and know that this was the last place I wanted to be.

As I sat down in my seat and fumbled with my seatbelt, the click of the two ends was meant to be a relief. This belt signified my security on this flight, the 12-hour journey home.

I had learned to both love and hate this trip. It meant the end of the year. The end of working my ass off, ready to go home to celebrate Christmas with my family — or what remained of it.

The intercom beeped and I hadn’t even realised that we had taxied and were ready to go.

“Cabin crew, please be seated for takeoff.”

You are not your art.

The thing with creatives is that our craft is so personal that we struggle to separate it from ourselves, our self-worth and our identity. If my art fails, I fail.

Our art is a portal to our deep vulnerabilities, our insecurities, our inner workings. When we display our art publicly, it’s the equivalent of standing on a stage naked declaring “here I am.”

Can I suggest the main audience for our art is the artist?

It is a roadmap of how you found a voice, it is words no other can language can communicate, it is the journey of drowning underwater but finally reaching the surface to breathe.

If you created just for yourself, it would be worth it.

The ambiguity of awkwardness You feel like you stick out like a rock on a cliff preventing the climb for others But does that become a ledge? And when does it become that? When I’m further up or halfway there? Why don’t I have the answers? Why is it so hard?

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on.”  – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on The Shore

Why do we imagine ourselves in another so often? What is it about our reality that scares us so much?

Often life gets overwhelming. Things get intense. If you’re an overthinker like me, the dark hours of the night are where the most insignificant things become a state of emergency for our populated imagination. It is these times we have two choices; to let those thoughts manifest or to escape. In fact, psychologists actually recommend escaping. Author Shirley Jackson says ““No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” Truuuuue.

If we are saying that “we all need to escape sometimes”, how much escapism is healthy?

One Murakami novel will make me appreciate the small things in life. Too many Murakami novels make me feel like selling everything I own, moving to Japan and living alone for the rest of my life. 

I think the most significant thing is to question “the why.” Anything can be escapism if we are using it to avoid our unpleasant reality. 

When does escapism become avoidance?