how dare i call myself an artist (and how dare i not)

art or skill: are you moved, or just impressed? Part I: The Roundabout

PART ONE — THE ROUNDABOUT

The more books I pulled from random shelves, the deeper I drowned myself in music (classical, hip-hop, everything), and the more art galleries I wandered into, the further I spiraled into the meditative depths of Buddhism (though your path could be anything: sculpture, crocheting, physics, you name it),
the more I felt a strange shiver inside me. The more I moved past words and concepts, theories and stories, the clearer it became: these creators were connecting with a part of my mind that felt beyond human. They kept revealing truths I hadn't yet reached but somehow already knew.

People from different worlds—across time, languages, mediums, circumstances—kept landing on the same truths about what it means to be human.

I imagined them as travelers, each taking their own paths but eventually arriving at the same roundabout. Wanderers, brilliant minds, all inexplicably drawn to a single sacred point where revelations were distilled to pure essence. A point so deeply human, yet elevated above humanity itself, that you couldn't grasp it intellectually alone. You had to stumble there, feel it yourself. No mere explanation or ‘snapshot’ could capture it.

Once you're there, you can’t unsee it, but you also can’t make others see. True understanding must be lived, not told. You scream it anyway, like the one who, after glimpsing the sun beyond Plato’s cave, rushes back inside to describe the light.

(This metaphor itself is exactly what I mean: Plato’s cave is the same roundabout that countless others have reached, the very place Jung danced around and Sylvia Plath agonized upon.)

The point is they had to share it. To express it. They couldn’t hold it in. They worked tirelessly to reveal that ineffable meeting place between the mortal and the divine, between reason and mystery. Some used vibrant hues, others mathematical formulas, musical notes, sacred sutras, or even profound silence. When it grips you, it pours out from the depths of your soul, you describe it in poems, paint it in light, try anything just to make the invisible felt.

My entire life I've battled with the problem of intangible value. How do you show someone what can't be seen? How do you make the invisible tangible, feelable? That moment when something invisible moves through you, demanding to be shared. It doesn't matter how, colors, words, numbers, stillness. The feeling is what counts, the intangible current surging through you, crying out for expression.

And that's when it clicked: it's not about the form, it's about the transmission.

I never thought of myself as a visual person, at least not in the traditional sense. I literally have no 3D vision (I looked it up, it’s called Visual-Spatial Dyscalculia or some geometry-processing deficit). I see the world as flat. Shapes and lines, yes. But no depth, no volume. I can’t draw. I can’t paint. I can barely coordinate my hands into anything that resembles manual skill.

And yet… my soul sees so much. But the translation is poor. I could never shape it, never catch it. My hands refused the apprenticeship of making anything “look like” something. For a long time, I thought this doomed me, shut the door on anything that could be called art, because isn’t that what artists do? show us how they see the world?

Somewhere early, I decided that real artists were the ones who could draw a horse, or paint a sad face, or turn their wrists into bridges for other people’s eyes.

But that’s the lie, isn’t it? The one they stitch inside every diploma and every paintbrush: that skill alone can save you.

This realization surged through me like one of the deepest truths I’ll ever manage to express in words: it’s not about skill, it’s about it’s about the staggering stroke of conscious luck and the strange, sacred honor of being the vessel. A helpless conduit for some eternal truth that just wants to take shape. That, I believe, is the heart of artistry. Not the product, but the journey to the roundabout, and the awareness you bring to what unfolds there, and the meaning you carve from the encounter.

Luckily, through all the reading, the music, the wandering I mentioned before, I began to understand. To me, an artist is anyone who touches that invisible current and gives it form.

(And believe me, this is how you separate the real ones from the tourists. The OGs? They've touched it. The rest? Just makin’ noise. You could have all the skills in the world and still not know … you might not even know that you don’t know. And that right there? That’s the dead giveaway.)

But the tormenting question still lingers: what exactly is form? How do you shape something intangible? Something that language can’t quite hold, and our senses can only approach like curious, playful children, but nowhere near its full expression.

To be touched by something real, something that insists on moving through you, and to try, in whatever way you can, to make it felt. That’s what it means to be an artist. That’s who I call artists: the ones who feel the current and choose to respond. This is why I write. I don’t think I’m talented, not in the “technical” sense. But I will pour truth through it. Honestly, I don’t even know what that fully feels like yet, because I’m still new to letting the vessel leak. That’s for Part II.

PS. Hope you enjoyed the visually challenged cover. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!!!

Part 2