Bringing Yourself Back

I’m on the tram swooping through Amsterdam with the new Modest Mouse album playing in my sound cancelling ear buds, and suddenly I feel that overlap between my present and teenage selves, and I feel just as fascinated by life and creativity as I did back then.

What brings you back to yourself?

My teenage self: in the art program in high school (Midgårdsskolan in Umeå), dreaming of being a comic artist because web comics were THE coolest, I thought. Narrative. Linework. Color. Magic, monsters, stories. People creating their own thing in a way that felt free. And somewhere in that fascination, I discovered Modest Mouse when the artist behind the web comic Hanna is Not a Boy’s Name drew the main character surrounded by lyrics from one of their songs. I listened to Float On I don’t know how many times.

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Concepts from a comic I'll never create.

Since then, I’ve moved across the world, studied graphic design (because, as it turns out, creating comics takes an amount of patience I do not possess so I had to do something else), worked in marketing and advertising and in-house and for ginormous companies and solo entrepreneurs, and it’s so very easy to forget what really inspired you to choose the creative track when you’re surrounded by deadlines and socials and world news. It’s so very easy to become cynical about creative industries when you forget that you are not your job(s).

I’ve been a bit grumpy about things.

And then Modest Mouse releases a new album and I’m brought back to myself and remember that I am deeply in love with visual narratives, that I’m endlessly inspired about how different mediums interact, and that I’m a weird little nerd who thinks magic is cool.

And suddenly I feel connected to that creative force inside myself. Suddenly, everything I’m doing now exists in the context of that original love of making.

What might bring you back to yourself today?

If you know it, press play.

"The things that made you weird as a kid make you great today" – James Victore