the mandate of my existence

Just as there is no meaning for my being here, there is no goal for my living. Yet I have created so, so, so many for myself. All of the game ideas that I will finish and release some day. The movie ideas. Song ideas. Dances I’ve felt I sorta choreographed in my head while listening to music. Places in the world I want to go to. Languages (Kairen) that I want to finish making.

My brain is full of projects to build and experiences to create and I just want to make all of them and that, my friends, is the mandate that I have assigned myself for my existence.

The drive to achieve and create feels paradoxically much more important than any of my prior achievements combined.

Its a pull that got me through any and all hard times in my life. It’s probably why I was so comfortable being single throughout college, seldom latching on to someone else’s fire when I was so preoccupied with my own. Sure I want nothing more than to see someone else’s fire grow, but I had given up on it and didn’t think it was worth my time to try looking.

It fascinates me how I am this way. I breathe creativity, and yet I have so few creative achievements compared to my friends who actually know what they are doing and have some kind of actual drive to go beyond just sky-high musings and build things.

I have built and created many things in my life, but in this Covid-lockdown-induced post-grad stupor, I have lost a lot of the motivation that brought me out of my bed and to my desk every day. Maybe it was the realization of how many experiences in college I could have had but I refused, and now it was too late to go back and experience them. Maybe it was the realization that I’ve spent so many of my formative years alone at my desk just coming up with things when I should have been spending more time exploring what already existed. (Sometimes I wish I met someone who made these same mistakes(?) with me so I would feel more comfortable in the shoes I’ve inadvertently chosen to wear, but whatever.)

But it almost feels like the daydreams I’ve had at 2pm on a Sunday, alone on my bed looking at the ceiling with sun-rays dancing across my lax face, turning over the balance of game mechanics, the rush of interviews, the colors of paintings, the guitar licks, the movie scenes, the experiences that I want to someday build, represent me more than anything else that I have ever done ever.

How much credit can you take for ideating and prototyping but never finishing. Our culture places upmost important on finishing things, and I will too, but I feel drawn to people who are ok with spinning tales of wonder in the sky and thinking of attaining them eventually. It’s the drive for me that is within me, that attracts me. The drive of creation even when one doesn’t know how. The dreams of what you can do with your hands that will create beauty for people to witness. The rabbitholes we go down in the twilight hours with “what about this” and “what if it was like that”, our imaginations wild with ideas and inferences.

Ultimately, the reason finishing is so important is that it’s one of the only ways we have to truly share what we are thinking, save for somehow transferring our mind’s visions into someone else’s head. We have to create through and through in order to end up with an object that can communicate meaning with others, an experience for people to witness and arrive at their own conclusions with. I think this is why I feel this goal is so important for myself; without it, I can only exist inside my own head. I have to manifest my ideas fully for them to be worth anything at all, at least worth in the sense that they are valuable to the world.

I am a daydreamer, and the mandate I’ve assigned to myself is to turn my dreams into realities for others to experience.

Originally published on Substack. View the source version ↗