Sonic, Death and the Ever-Expanding Universe: My Artistic Genesis

A Series Examining the Complex Interplay of Creativity and Mental Health Through an Artist's Journey—From Stage to Therapy.

I remember the first time I decided to become an artist. I was probably around eight years old, already interested in piano and drawing, and I had made the decision to write a Sonic the Hedgehog comic book. I sat and spent hours drawing what was really my first story. It’s hard to remember with exact precision, but I have a vague memory of feeling extremely calm, very centred. I loved Sonic, but I wanted my own version and, somehow, writing it and sharing it felt unlike any other activity I had experienced before. This was also the age when I became acutely aware of my own mortality. I would sometimes take a sort of mental snapshot of a moment and think to myself: this very moment, you will remember on your deathbed. The profound anxiety of this was hitting me rather brutally, and life was quite unsettled back then. My parents had divorced, and I found myself constantly being relocated, sometimes far from my mother.

The bridge between my childhood aspirations and my current motivations is a complex one. The yearning to create is very much entrenched for me in a rather adolescent existentialism. I’m not afraid to admit it. In fact, I spent most of my artistic life mocking my own rather desperate sense of romanticism. Without veering into grandiloquence—well, perhaps just a little—my decision to become an artist was rooted in an almost religious belief that by making something and sharing it, I was making some form of essential contribution. That it justified my personal consumption of oxygen, in a way.

This was still before I started thinking about death.

Of course, I have plenty to live for these days, my family, my lovely kids, but finding some existential reason to occupy space actually really helps curb my naturally cynical disposition. A religious belief? Well, I’m not a believer, but I like to think that in some way the call religious people feel is not so dissimilar to the call I felt. The yearning to keep on creating, despite the obstacles. And there are many. A creative career is absolutely littered with challenges and the debris of everyone else’s journey. Debris of dreams and ambitions, strewn before the all-important gatekeepers. Debris created by unscrupulous people ready for anything to get to their own dream, or created by folks whose only dream is to get famous. The exhausting requirement to grind for constant attention. I think that for some this is okay. They manage to find some happy balance, some form of stoicism and just tag along, treating the whole thing like what it truly is: a big game. I mean, the universe is ever-expanding and soon enough we’ll all be dead, so, to me, it’s hard sometimes to care about the latest 30 under 30 list, or the latest stars of tomorrow list or whatever new status is needed to move forward. And yet… I suppose that for me, it’s genuinely about creating something nice, that helps people who have it tough to escape for a while. Maybe dream, think, forget about their own mortality for a bit...

In my next post, I'll delve into my tumultuous start as an actor in Paris, and how what seemed like a dream quickly turned into a nightmare.