Creating as understanding

Patrick talks about his journey through music and how creating it helped him make sense of the world and to a lesser extent, himself.

What’s up y’all 👋🏼 welcome back to another edition of Conversation Piece: The Newsletter! A nice slice of your favorite pie to all our returning readers and a big scoop of your favorite ice cream or ice cream-like dessert to everyone joining us for the first time. I appreciate y’all.

While Katt Williams’ interview on Club Shay Shay continues to dominate our collective consciousness, I find myself ruminating on a different video — a recent TED Talk I came across from Liana Finck:

From the moment the video started I found myself captivated by Liana’s message of art — of creating — helping us make sense of the world. As someone who has recently found themselves self-identifying as *something* of a creative, specifically creating as a way to tell their story and find their place within the larger fabric of a world that doesn’t always make sense, this really resonated with me.

College was the first time I found the world to be more baffling than I had in my small town. The first time this happened was my first semester of school, which happened at Ball State. I took a U.S. history course and on the first day, the professor told us we would be challenged in our knowledge of this country’s past in a way we were not in high school. He was not lying.

This was the first time I heard about the atrocities of Ronald Reagan, the systemic and ongoing racism against Black people, the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, that Christopher Columbus was not such a great guy.

It was eye opening. It forced me to start thinking differently about the world around me. It was a challenge, and the more I learned, the more the ways of this world — and specifically the people who perpetuate them — began to baffle me.

It didn’t, however, prompt me to look inward. Only outward. Only at the world, never at myself.

To make sense of my newfound bafflement, I fell backwards into writing lyrics to hiphop music when I was at Purdue. These songs did less to make sense of the world and more for me to express what I was learning and how those things I learned made me feel about said world.

It was new and exciting, and I found myself connecting with this genre of music beyond the glitz and glam; I wanted to share a message the way my favorites did — KRS-One, Mickey Factz, Kid Cudi (the earliest version), Mobb Deep, Wale.

This was the creative outlet I thought I would utilize for the rest of my life. And for the next 10 years, it was.

For those ten years I stayed making music. Writing lyrics and putting songs together became more than just a passion; it was an obsession.

It was also the way I made sense of the world around me, particularly when that world made no sense at all. From racism to misogyny to homophobia to ableism, writing music and crafting songs helped me find context and make sense of a world that seemed to hate more than love, that seemed to break more than build, that seemed to baffle more than clarify.

Additionally, it was the first time I would address being Korean, being Asian and being adopted, although this was more abstract than anything else and didn’t address the turmoil and pain that I still couldn’t articulate.

But they’re there, and when I think about it now, I can see how the music and the writing were trying to break through the well of suppression and surface the feelings and thoughts I’d stuffed down there for 20 years. They were the cracks in the armor that was my rejection, that was the status quo, that was the mask I’d created.

At the end of the day, though, the music I was making, the things I was writing, were still in furtherance of this mask. While creating this way helped me put things in perspective and made them make a certain amount of sense, they never, truly, dug at the heart of the issue at hand: my fractured sense of identity and unwillingness to confront my comfortability.

It reached a point where the music stopped making things make sense. I chalk that up to my struggles with identity. I realize this is not the way it always goes with artists, but I in hindsight I’m glad I was aware enough to make that call. Something was off, and the passion + obsession I had when I started wasn’t there in the same way.

Creating became a burden, and my loose grip on who I was became the dominant factor in what I was doing. I could put the smile on, step up to the mic, and deliver, but I wasn’t really delivering, I wasn’t really doing what creating is meant to do: solve problems + figure things out.

I needed something different, and little did I know I was reaching that point of discovery.

I released my last song (above) about three years ago. It was around the same time I came to consciousness which coincided with the discovery of a new creative outlet: podcasting.

What I’ve done in podcasting is both different and an extension of everything I did in music for that decade of my life. Music helped me make sense of the world around me, as well as bits and pieces of my internal self.

Podcasting took it a step further and helped me break open the well, to dive deeply into it and utilize it to understand myself: from reclamation to self-acceptance to self-love.

As Liana says in her TED Talk, “For me, creation is an act of solving problems, of figuring things out.”

Music stopped being the outlet for me to figure out the world and myself. And I needed to find something else, creatively, that would help me do so. Luckily, I found it. And we’re just getting started 🫶🏼

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This week on Conversation Piece….

On this week’s episode, Patrick takes a deep dive into three core memories of his journey: one great, two not so great. He talks about how these things became foundational in how he understands himself today and how he understands + contextualizes his past experience. He also discusses how these things tie together to form the sacred timeline of his life, while reiterating the benefits of sharing personally (if one is able to do so).

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