Writing for my life

It’s a delicious feeling to know I’ve misled everyone…out of preservation. For twenty years, I’ve given away my creativity, time, energy, and intellectual property to clients, disguised in plain sight. I’ve uplifted others into stratospheres of influence, such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, funding, successful exits, great relationships, and many more outcomes. The journalists know. The clients know. Society does not. The artist in me has been depleted and ultimately exiled to the margins of my life.

For two decades, I’ve pretended to be dim-witted in rooms where I could feel the temperature of a conversation before a single word was spoken. I’ve dulled my shine to avoid being perceived as a threat. To survive the paranoia of being born into a Jewish family, even as a freethinker who has been outspoken about the shadow sides of closed-up communities.

It’s a familiar story to many who are built like me. Empaths in the corporate biosphere, gifted with painful clarity, seeing too much, too early, and too often. In other words, people who are highly intelligent and highly sensitive. Many like me left. Some were crushed. Others became lone wolves, autonomous by necessity, not desire. I’m one of them. Our society is definitely not optimal for highly intelligent and highly sensitive people.

Mimicry without comprehension

I’ve been a ghostwriter and shadow-architect of public discourse in the Dutch, English, and French markets around the globe. I watched as words I coined became part of the zeitgeist. As entire editorial directions were built on my signals. I pitched, whispered, and hinted as everyone was parroting the same phrases, praising their cleverness. This wasn’t synchronicity. It was mining. Of me. Of my soul. Without a single ounce of recognition as an artist.

Recently, I sent a personal email to an editor-in-chief. Days later, three of her journalists regurgitated the contents into their articles. No attribution. Just thematic theft dressed as a trend because they own the stage. Because they can. Exhausting. It’s not just that they take, it’s that they do so with entitlement, as though my soul as a storyteller is a public and free utility. As if I’m a doormat.

This period of shadow-existence is over. I’m no longer anyone’s rug. Not in journalism and not outside of it. I say less now, because silence is my sanctuary. In fact, I want to share even less, up to nothing anymore. Now, it’s my season as a philosophical writer, from a place so real it consumes me.

And thus, returning to my first sentence: I’ve outwitted them all. The great joke of my next novel’s creation? Everyone thinks they know what I’m creating based on a couple of things I have shared in the public space. They don’t. What’s coming is a rebuke of everything they assume. And that’s very fulfilling.

I’ve seen mediocrities on Substack stage pitiful experiments based on whispers of my words. Laughable. Not just because the output’s garbage, but because it confirms what I’d foreseen: mimicry without comprehension. Trend-chasing without soul.

Alchemist of human experience

As if to punctuate the absurdity, I also received sexist jabs via the LinkedIn inbox recently. It was from a publication I contributed to a dozen years ago, under a different leadership, of course. They only have male columnists. One of them copied me twice in a couple of weeks. I’ve filed the evidence with the Dutch Council of Journalism. There was a time I would have let it slide. Not anymore. I’m in my forties now; a shark when it comes to protecting my writing.

When I say I tried to enter certain spaces, only to find them hermetically sealed by small-minded people, I say it not with bitterness, but with clarity. These egos aren’t protecting art; they’re protecting themselves from people who can be better than them. People they don’t like. You know, because JEW, for example. Or, WOMAN with BRAINS. The bullies are everywhere. This is the world we live in. But not my world. Now, I choose!

Let’s get to the heart of the matter and why this rant and behind-the-scenes of the artist’s life are important to share. The local echo chambers of the ‘approved voices’ are spiritual, intellectual, and artistic poison. True writing isn’t a copycat product but metamorphosis. The artist isn’t a technician of style and of what works with others. The artist is the alchemist of human experience.

What I create is lived through and inside out, not outside in. No one can make this because no one has lived a single thing to the same level. No one makes the same neurological connections to link specific details together. It’s that simple. No one should either.

I studied the craft, walked the fire of literary discipline, and sacrificed years of income and other activities for this. Yet, I hear people claim it’s okay to copy artists. They say it like it’s normal within the artistic world. But to copy is to forfeit your becoming. You become what British-Bulgarian thinker Julia Kristeva once called a ‘signifier with no signified’.

I’m so happy that the careers of some of those are numbered because of their age. But I still have violence in my heart, so to speak, when I don’t ignore them. All you egoistic entities out there, whether artificial intelligence, thieves, bullies, and so on, get the hell lost. That’s all I have to say.

Alignment with God’s presence when I write

In the age of AI-generated sludge, this distinction matters more than ever. I saw comedian John Oliver mock the AI slop culture. He’s right. What’s more dangerous is not just the flood of content. It’s the erasure of the artist’s life-essence behind the content. The why is gone. The who is absent. The how is algorithmic.

The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka wrote: ‘The artist’s role is to expose the hidden, to give form to what lies beneath.’ That’s why I’ve returned to the work with a devotion I’ve never known before. No one knows what I’m building. But if the world ends, if war breaks out, if I vanish, the work I’m writing is what I’d like to leave behind. This is what I want to do with my time on earth. I write for my life. Literally. And for the first time, I know I’m living the artist’s life the way I should.

To be an artist isn’t just to reflect the world. It’s to birth new ones. It’s not about the applause—at all. It’s about the alignment with God’s presence when I write. Even if I received one-star reviews only, I would still know that what I’ve made is ferociously real, great, and mostly Divine.

No, I won’t tell you anything about it. Yes, I guess people will attack. Not because the work isn’t good, but because of who I freaking am. Twenty cursed years of this… But I’m not the same anymore. In the past years, I’ve changed so much. I devour falsehoods now. Plus, it’s important to be surrounded by great people who have your back.

Not status-climbers or leeches, but artists who do the work, every single day. Who go to hell and paradise every single session of their writing. People who work and thus have no or little need to degrade others. These people give me feedback on how to shape this work for an art blockbuster hybrid movie. People who are honest and listen to whatever I need to share.

‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it’, said Bertolt Brecht. This is the love of my life. No man, no child, no construct comes close. This work is it. My work runs through my veins. I’ll consider how to build the structure. A small business team and a trusted booker in the future. But the work leads.

This is consequence

There’s a private, evolutionary path to being an artist. You don’t just make art. You are art. Through years of pain, grace, exile, wisdom, and so much more. The real work begins when the gestation ends. This, right now, is birth. Every chapter is read aloud a thousand times, rewritten until it bleeds perfection. I walk through my house, rehearsing scenes. I wake up with a detail that must be fixed. I break a literary rule on purpose. This is incarnation.

‘Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious’, said Oscar Wilde. The paradox holds: my work is play and war, prayer and protest. So, I’m bloody serious, Mister Wilde. You’ve heard of the thin line between genius and madness. Now, I understand how that feels. It’s a sacred labour.

I’ve lost time. And yet, not really. As a writer, I can say: we’re no childhood friends. Someday, I’ll say: we’re not in Kansas anymore. In the words of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian novelist few in the Anglo world dare to engage with: ‘I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.’ That effort, invisible to most, is the lifeblood of art.

What you’ll see isn’t simply writing, it’s words of prayer. It’s vengeance and reverence in the same breath. This isn’t content. This is consequence. As the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss once observed, ‘To be creative is not to be free, but to be faithful. Faithful to the inner necessity that demands to be expressed.’ I can say I finally am.