What Romantic Love Has to Do With Your Creative Life (And Mine)
On love, creativity, and the episodes we're afraid to make.
Something I’ve been thinking about lately: looking back at Nandología, you can trace a sketch, a mind map, a timeline of my emotional state through every episode. Just based on the content. In a way, each one is a reflection of what I was feeling and what I was thinking about at the time.
This is especially true of my most recent episode with Pepper Maria, one about romantic narrative. My relationship with romantic love is a curious one. It has been mostly absent, and insurmountably intense when it has been present.
My romantic relationships have been few and far between, but when they’ve happened, they’ve been life-changing, in both the best and the worst ways. It was the end of a relationship that gave me the motivation to pursue something greater than what I was at the time. It made me end up in a place like Barcelona, doing a master’s degree, meeting people from so many different backgrounds. It was also the beginning of a relationship that made me find brightness in life again, that made me think that maybe the fairy tales I heard growing up were true, even if partially.
If I compare my romantic life to my peers’, it doesn’t seem as exciting on the surface. But it has been infinitely stimulating in a very intimate, innermost sense.
I’ve always felt tempted to see this as a disadvantage. As proof that my life was not as interesting as other people’s, that I was somehow doomed from the start to live on the outskirts of the human experience. I know now that that’s mostly an impression I give myself, because of my nature, and because of how negative thoughts can permeate and distort everything around you.
I still reflect, from time to time, on the effect romantic love has on my life. That is why this episode was tough to plan and tough to get through, even if it doesn’t show when you watch it. It hit me at a personal level. When you make a point of facing your insecurities, and you’re right in the thick of it, you start questioning whether it’s even worth it, or whether it’s even working.
If my emotional state in the weeks after recording is anything to go by, I think it got me. I think the reflections I’ve had since then have made it worthwhile, even if I can’t see it yet.
A good friend once told me my podcast seemed eclectic, like something that changed tune often, that went in all these different directions. Common wisdom says that’s misguided, that I should focus on one thing. I’ve tried to give it an underlying thread, something that ties it all back to the creative process. But it always ends up branching out into whatever is interesting to me at the time.
I think that’s a perfect parallel to the creative process itself. It’s messy. It’s non-linear. It cannot exist within the constraints of a strict system. It needs to evolve at its own pace and in its own form, or lack of it.
The branch I decided to go down this time was personal. Very personal. The feelings I have right now are tough to sit through, they seem very big, and sometimes they make me wonder if I’ll be able to get through them. But I think the result of this episode is worthwhile.
I hope that people listening will feel at least some validation that the doubts we carry as human beings are universal. That we all have them, each in our own way. It all comes back to the same eternal question: who are we, what are we doing, where are we going, and what makes life worth living.
I hope you like it. It comes out May 20th. I hope you’re here to listen, in the same way I was when I recorded it.