All my life I’ve been different from most people around me, and I say that without pride. It’s a burden I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Living this way is exhausting, yet I know I could never conform to common thinking. I find no comfort in alignment.

I’ve often wondered why art must always seep out of suffering. For a long time, I fooled myself into thinking I could create art that sparked serenity, peace, and joy. Just a couple of days ago, I was reading a passage in Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic. In it, he explains how essential it is to find within yourself an impersonal space—so you can prescribe psychomagic acts directly from your unconscious, connected to the unconscious of the person before you.

He writes: “(…) when I prescribe an act, when I play my role as a psychomagician and fall into a trance or self-hypnosis—call it whatever you like—it isn’t my small self speaking. I feel that what I’m about to say emerges from deeper places.”

It’s only when you step outside yourself and become a channel for the energy that flows everywhere, like the wind, that you create something truly powerful. At least, that’s been my experience. I’ve always seen the artist as an interpreter who translates energy into images—or sounds, or dance, or any other form—with uneven results depending on how much they can let go of themselves.

For me, the highest expression of art is a work that functions like a mirror: neutral, in a sense, so that anyone can look inside and see themselves. It doesn’t suggest a path or impose a reading. It is an abyss, a black hole that touches the soul directly, bypassing the intellect—the greatest obstacle to art.

And yet, in full contradiction to this belief, over the past two years, since I began stitching on fabric with needle and thread, I’ve aimed to transmit through my work the balance I thought I had finally achieved in life. It was the balance of staying free from coercion, clear and consistent in my choices, enriched by years of study, and shaped by the evolution that followed.

I started with delicate, almost imperceptible drawings: airy, colorful, light. Within a few months they grew tangled, dark, rough. They carried force, rage, Mars in Leo, the instinct to defend territory, the raw pulse of fight or flight. I unraveled each colored thread and replaced it with earthy, acidic, metallic tones. Then I added two more: one white, stitched with a different point that pulls and pierces the fabric, and one neutral, always the same. That second thread was the other brother/son, the triad I grew up in too early. But I had already built wide shoulders, armored soon after with a sturdy, megalomaniac constellation. And so it went.

In the end, pain is the doorway between energy and creation. None of us escapes it, no matter how happy our lives may seem. So we might as well make peace with it and love even the suffering we’ve endured, and still endure. That coin from the parable must be spent—not buried, not wasted.

The true difference between heaven and hell comes at the end of one’s life. Looking back, you should be able to say: I did everything I could to give my existence meaning. I kicked and fought, I shouted and cried, I helped, I loved, I spread ideals, I welcomed, I rejoiced, and I suffered like a dog. In a single word, I lived.