Creating to Be Seen: My Battle Against Oblivion

11 Nov, 2024

As I stood there, camera ready, watching the first light creep over the horizon, I felt that familiar tightness in my chest. The fear that this moment, like so many others, would slip away forever if I couldn't somehow capture it.

My fingers trembled slightly against the cold metal of the camera, but it wasn't just the pre-dawn chill. Two hours earlier, while the world slept, I had dragged myself out of warm sheets, driven through empty streets, and climbed this hillside in darkness. The absurdity wasn't lost on me - trading warm sleep for cold fingers and the possibility of failure.

The world doesn't wait for us. The light shifts, shadows fall, and moments pass, indifferent to our presence. But for a split second, with my lens poised and focus set, it feels as though I'm holding time itself, refusing to let these moments slip into the flow of obscurity.

This isn't about photography. It's about a more primal terror. The knowledge that every way we understand and experience the world, every unique perspective and insight, could vanish without trace.

Each click of the shutter is my way of saying: I saw this. I was here. This mattered.

Each morning I venture out to shoot becomes a small act of defiance against time's endless march. In the hills of Porto, as I watched the soft light paint the horizon, the mist hovering over silent streets, the way shadows slowly retreat from the ancient landscape, I realized that these aren't just scenes - they're fragments of time that would slip away unmarked if I couldn't somehow capture their existence.

There's something almost compulsive about it now - this need to translate the intangible into something concrete.

I don't chase these pre-dawn moments because it's fun. I chase them because the alternative creates a lingering discomfort I can't shake. It’s a discomfort that extends beyond photography; it's the quiet torment every creator knows, whether they're racing to capture a fleeting idea in words before it evaporates, watching the perfect turn of phrase dissolve mid-thought, or struggling to translate a business vision into reality before someone else does.

It's not panic or pain, but the burden of watching our unique perspectives slip through our fingers like sand. Each act of creation - whether through lens, pen, or code - becomes a small rebellion agains impermanence; our refusal to let these moments of vanish unmarked without our stamp.

Unlike other forms of achievement that can be measured or replicated, creation leaves behind something unnervingly personal. You can't fake that kind of evidence. You can't retroactively construct it.

Each creation becomes a time stamp of existence, proof that someone saw the world exactly this way, at exactly this moment.

The alternative is terrifying. To live and die without leaving any evidence of how we saw and understood the world.

I create because I'm terrified of becoming invisible, haunted by the fear of oblivion. Each creation becomes a rebellion against obscurity, against a universe vast enough to swallow whole galaxies without notice. Each frame becomes evidence in a case I'm building, not for posterity or legacy, but for the simple fact of my own consciousness.

Standing there on that hillside, watching dawn paint the sky in impossible colors, I understood again why I do this.

But this translation of consciousness into reality demands a price.

The Price of Making Something Real

Creating anything demands a specific kind of madness.

I experience it most intimately through photography—the pre-dawn chases for perfect light—and most painfully in building a business, where each iteration strips away another layer of certainty. But the pattern reveals itself in every attempt to create, each one extracting its own peculiar toll, each revealing something unsettling about what we'll sacrifice to make something real.

Over years of chasing sunrise shots in different locations, I've watched tourists snap quick photos and leave, satisfied with documenting that they were there. But I linger, searching for something more.

One summer at Lake Bled in Slovenia, this hunger drove me to spend four consecutive mornings hiking to different vantage points around the lake. Each morning, I stayed for hours, moving inches left or right, waiting for the light to shift just so, searching for that precise composition that matched what my mind's eye saw. Not just the scene itself, but the feeling it evoked, the story it told. Each morning, I watched the sunrise paint the church spire, the castle walls, the mirror-smooth water in slightly different hues.

I could have taken a decent photo on any of those mornings, the kind that tourists post on Instagram and move on. But I believed that if the conditions aligned exactly right, if the mist hung just so over the water, if the light caught the church tower at precisely the right angle, I could capture something extraordinary.

The first three mornings brought their own versions of "almost." Too many clouds one day, harsh winds the next, then perfect technical conditions that somehow still missed the essence of what I saw. Each "failure" taught me something new about the lake, about light, about what I was really searching for.

On the fourth morning, while others slept, I climbed higher than before, to a vantage point I'd discovered during previous attempts.

The pre-dawn air was still, holding its breath. Then the clouds began to part, and sunlight burst through like heaven's spotlight, casting golden beams across the lake's mirror surface. The church spire emerged beneath this ethereal glow, so perfect it seemed almost unreal. Mountains stood sentinel in the distance, their peaks softened by the morning light.

When I finally pressed the shutter, I knew. This wasn't just a pretty picture of Lake Bled.

This was how I saw it.

While photography reveals one face of the price of creation through this relentless pursuit of excellence, building a business has extracted an even steeper toll.

For the past nine months, I've watched my business ideas fall apart under scrutiny. What seemed brilliant at midnight dissolves by morning - my own market research reveals fatal flaws, conversations with potential investors expose blind spots, mentors point out competitors I hadn't considered. Each conversation with industry experts, each deep dive into market analysis, strips away another layer of naive assumptions. Each iteration brings me back to square one, humbler but somehow more determined.

The difference in scale becomes clear in what's at risk.

While a failed photograph costs only time and sleep, a business demands everything. And the price cuts deeper because I'm still in the midst of the process. There's no finished creation yet to justify the sacrifice, only the daily confrontation with what doesn't work.

Here, the price is measured in dinners cut short for networking calls, in friendships that fade as work consumes every conversation, in the growing distance from family who can't understand why a steady job isn't enough.

The stress seeps into everything: that tightness in my chest when another assumption proves wrong, the weight in my stomach each morning wondering if today's the day I should quit, the way my thoughts spiral into worst-case scenarios during what should be quiet moments.

Here, in building a business, the act of creating exacts every sacrifice.

Anxiety hums in the background, seeping into every moment, turning simple pleasures into stolen time. Potential disasters invade my thoughts during family dinners, competitor updates take priority over good morning texts, and even relaxation begins to feel like a lapse in responsibility.

Each day becomes a battle between the voice that says “this might never work” and the deeper conviction that stopping now would mean accepting defeat.

Mirror of Creation: How Making Shapes the Maker

Yet, I keep coming back.

Not because it's enjoyable; it's often painful, humbling, even frightening. There's something desperate in this persistence, a refusal to let all these months of toil disappear without creating something real. A refusal to be labelled as insignificant.

Perhaps because here, every part of me (the messy, brilliant, intense) finally finds its place.

This isn't about finding nobility in suffering.

The pre-dawn alarms suck.

The failed attempts are brutal.

The uncertainty is exhausting.

But here's what makes the struggle matter: each moment of difficulty is an invitation to quit. Each setback offers a perfectly reasonable exit. The greater the struggle, the more numerous these exits become, each one whispering "You've done enough. No one would blame you for stopping here."

Maybe it's not just about creating, but the pursuit of something rare and difficult, something I had to reach beyond myself to find.

I want my creations to capture something elusive, pushing beyond the obvious until I'm left with something that feels earned. The satisfaction isn't just in having captured something beautiful, but in knowing that this particular thing could only exist because I refused to settle, and that I paid a price for it. Through this dual struggle, I earn the right to call it mine.

By the time a photograph emerges from dozens of failed attempts, or a business concept survives countless brutal iterations, something profound has happened. The suffering isn't redeemed or made meaningful - it simply serves as a signpost of how many times we could have quit but didn't. Each creation becomes forensic evidence of our refusal to disappear.

It's in these moments of persistence, through these painful transformations, that we emerge with more than just artifacts of our effort. This transformation often demands everything I have, and sometimes more than I think I can give. It requires confronting my limitations, facing my failures, and pushing beyond what I believed possible. Not because creating simply changes us, but because it demands we become something more than we currently are to match its vision.

Creation becomes a mirror, reflecting back pieces of identity I hadn't recognized before.

Each time I choose to start over rather than settle, each time I push past what seems reasonable in pursuit of something that exists only in my mind's eye, I'm learning something fundamental about who I am.

What begins as a quest to capture moments becomes a process of self-discovery.

These aren't calculated decisions. They're instinctive choices that reveal what truly drives us. When we look back at these moments, we see our values not as we imagined them, but as they actually are: proven through action, tested by sacrifice, revealed in the space between acceptable and excellent.

Each creation becomes both verdict and artifact; proof not just that I existed, but of how the making transformed me.

I'm learning that the person who started this journey no longer exists. The trail of work I leave behind marks more than just what I created - it maps the territory between who I was and who I'm becoming.

This might be creation's most profound revelation. We are not just the makers, but the thing being made. In the end, our creations don't just prove we existed. They prove that we lived.

If you've never created, if you've never poured your own chaos, your own joy, your own fire into something that wasn't there before, I challenge you to start. Don't let this life pass by without at least tasting this feeling. Because when you look back at the trail of creations you've left behind, each one marked with your unique signature of effort, vision and persistence, you'll see more than just things you made. You'll see a map of who you became in the making.


A heartfelt gratitude to Rebecca Isjwara, Mark Connolley-Mendoza, Jordana Schelberg, Aaliah Elnasseh, Hari Sriskantha, Sondra Yu and Alivia Duran whose insights and feedback helped shape this piece.

P.S. You can check out more of my photos here.

Reflections