Oscar Wilde once wrote:
"If you want to be a grocer or a general or a politician or a judge, you will invariably become it. That is your punishment.
If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life, that I would call the artistic life. If each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know, you will never become anything. And that is your reward."
Most of us spend our lives trying to become something. Successful. Respected. Established. Important.
We build identities and then spend decades protecting them.
The problem is that the moment you become certain of who you are, you stop paying attention.
You stop exploring, stop risking failure and stop allowing yourself to change.
For years I thought the goal was to figure out who I was.
Some of the most important decisions I've ever made arrived when I had absolutely no idea what came next.
The end of a marriage.
The decision to leave a career behind.
The decision to return to painting.
None of those choices came with certainty attached. Only possibility.
And fear. Especially fear.
Years before my life changed, I was already writing songs about feeling voiceless, frightened and disconnected from myself.
At the time I thought I was writing fiction but looking back, I think I was writing messages to a future version of myself.
Not predictions. Instructions.
Evidence that some part of me already knew I couldn't remain where I was.
The strange thing about becoming an artist is that it hasn't removed uncertainty. It's multiplied it.
Every painting, every exhibition and every decision begins with not knowing and yet I've never felt more alive.
Not because I've found myself but because I've stopped trying to.
The older I get, the less interested I am in arriving. That only suggests there is a final destination. A completed version of yourself. A point at which all the questions disappear.
I don't think such a place exists. At least I hope it doesn't.
The work that matters most seems to emerge from uncertainty. From standing at the edge without knowing exactly what comes next.
From jumping anyway.
Perhaps that's what Wilde meant.
Not that we should avoid commitment or responsibility but that the greatest danger is allowing a single identity to become a prison.
A politician. A businessman. A husband. An artist.
None of those things are who we are. They're simply chapters.
The reward is remaining curious enough to keep turning the page.
To remain unfinished, uncertain. To keep becoming.
And if that means never quite becoming anything at all, that's not a failure.
That's the reward.