The Beautiful, Crushing Act of Expression

For anyone who’s ever made something and felt like it meant everything.

I’ve been trying to find the space and words to express something about music and music making for a while now. It usually forms in my heart and stomach as a mix of deep emotion, sadness, and empathy while I’m watching someone play live. It’s physical it’s so strong.

Elijah and one of his Yellow Squares

Over the years, as a beat maker, producer, producer-writer, signed artist and now an independent artist, I’ve worked with so many creatives (as most of us have), literally hundreds, but particularly early-stage artists. Often at a time when they are still working it all out, and often pouring their souls into their output. What I often wonder is: is it even possible to communicate the intensity of the hope and emotional entanglement between us as a people and doing ‘the thing’ to the world? I’m not sure it is, but I want people to understand somehow.

I find myself often watching someone I know or have worked with, and in those moments, be it on stage or DJ’ing or in the studio, I see how complete they are. I’ve been in those shoes, and I can genuinely say the closest thing I can compare it to is holding my firstborn for the first time. That may sound crazy, but it’s this mess of being overwhelmed, terrified, feeling an immense sense of purpose and hope all at the same time. I’m not sure those words even do it justice.

I find it both beautiful and crushing at the same time. I feel it when I see it in others, and I think it’s amplified by what years of experience have shown me usually comes next, or comes hand in hand with that moment. It’s like it needs its own word to describe it. Something the Japanese language seems to do so well. Like ikigai, meaning “reason for being” or “value in life.” I find english often lacks depth or the emotional context to explain the complexity of what I’m trying to communicate. The rest of life, our growth as individuals, the challenges of building a career as an artist, and how they all overlap and smash together, is complicated and interrelated. They are not separate stories. They are the same one. It’s often described as being part of our identity, how we make sense of the world. And these things sound like an overreach to those on the outside, but honestly, they don’t even do it justice. Maybe the simplest thing to compare it to is a great love, and in that way everyone can understand how that it is so much more that mere words can describe.

Each person’s journey with their creative self and how that develops is so deeply complex and unique to each individual. But the emotions—the joy, the heartbreak, the confusion—are all shared experiences. I often wonder why the expectations placed on us by what we think success is, ends up framing it as a challenge, rather than a spiritual journey. Like those that people take on in a pilgrimage, or an ayahuasca retreat, or their time in therapy, or even just going travelling and growing up. Why does the framing so often turn it into trauma we never shake, or something we hold on to as failure, or the belief we will never fit in elsewhere? Maybe we need to look at our creativity like a past relationship, its similarities lying in the way that we can only see the value of the struggle when we are old enough to convert those experiences into something that allows us to build something more meaningful and stable the next time around.

I wanted to just sit down with a blank screen about write this because I wanted to try and show the world what is happening below the surface. This thing I feel because I’ve felt it and seen it a million times. I wanted to try and say something about the unspoken but un-communicable weight of this experience that so many go through when finally finding an outlet, and then chasing a dream.

This ‘hobby’, as it is often framed, is probably closer to a… well, I don’t know. Because it lasts for years and sometimes never leaves us. Like a piece of us missing or unfulfilled, living with us through everything.

Part of the feeling when watching others comes from how beautiful it is to see people expressing themselves that way, and being ‘great’ in that moment. Perfect in an act of expression. Beautiful. Whole. And more than people would like to believe, really, really good at that creative act. Which, as we know, does not equate to a career.

So maybe that is the bigger issue here. Not to explain to others what it feels like to be on the journey of building a creative career, but to speak to myself and others about how we frame it. Instead of seeing it as a battle against a system that makes it near impossible to meet what we see as success, what if we framed it as a process?

Not a hobby, but a journey of getting to know ourselves. Of expressing ourselves. Of learning new skills, not just practical, but professional and emotional. Not a hobby or a task to be finished. A way to make sense of and escape from the rest of our lives.

How do we create a system, a community, a mindset, where we feel like that is the goal? A new mental framework. So that all that emotional labour becomes growth. Becomes value. Carried through into the rest of our lives.

Maybe that will help us make sense of our relationship with creativity and the thread that it weaves through out lives. Maybe then people will ascribe a new value system to it and recognise the work that needs to happen for the music they love to exist. And maybe as part of the conversation we as creators can find more purpose in the act, as finding purpose in contributing to the well-being of others is another factor of Ikigai.