Notes from the Path # 1 — Why I Started Cult of Wonder

There is something I should probably tell you before we begin.

I didn’t start Cult of Wonder because I had finally become the creative person I always wanted to be.I started it because I got tired of waiting.

For most of my life, creativity felt like a country I could visit but never belong to. I admired artists, musicians, writers and craftspeople from a distance, convinced they possessed something I didn’t. They seemed to have permission. I didn’t.

So I became good at other things.

I studied law, then philosophy, worked in the field of human rights. I completed a PhD. I worked hard. I collected qualifications that looked impressive from the outside.

The strange thing was that none of them changed how I felt inside.

In fact, after finishing my PhD, I felt embarrassed that I had one. I realise how absurd that sounds.

I had achieved something I had worked towards for years, yet the familiar voice was already whispering: It’s not enough.

That voice has accompanied me for a long time.

It tells me I have nothing worth sharing. That I should wait until I know more. Make more. Become more.

It tells me there is a certain kind of person who gets to call themselves creative—and I am not one of them.

For years, I believed it.

Looking back, I don’t think the problem was that I wasn’t creative.

The problem was that I thought creativity was an identity rather than a practice.

I thought it belonged to a selected few artists. To gifted people. To those who had always known they were creative.

Not to someone like me, who hesitated before posting a photograph or writing a sentence because it might not be good enough.

Then, slowly, something began to shift.

Not through one dramatic revelation, but through many small encounters. Travelling. Meeting craftspeople whose work was inseparable from the way they lived. Watching people make beautiful things with patience rather than urgency.

Feeling, perhaps for the first time, that making didn’t have to be about proving anything.

It could simply be a way of paying attention.

A way of being alive.

I began to notice something else too.

The moments when I felt most like myself were rarely the moments when I was achieving.

They were the moments when I was making. Writing. Walking. Collecting ideas. Learning a new craft. Singing. Following curiosity without needing to justify it.

And yet, every time I wanted to begin something new, the same old voice returned.

…Who do you think you are?

…Who would care?

…You’re not ready.

Maybe you’ve met that voice too.

If you have, I want you to know something.

I’m writing this while it is still speaking.

Not because I’ve conquered it.

Because I’ve stopped waiting for it to disappear.

Cult of Wonder wasn’t born out of certainty.

It was born out of a decision.

A decision to stop postponing the life I kept imagining.

A decision to stop believing that creativity belonged to other people.

A decision to become a beginner again.

This project isn’t a place where I’ll teach you how to become creative.

I’m not standing at the end of the path, waving people towards me.

I’m somewhere on the path myself.

Learning.

Making mistakes.

Finding courage.

Losing it.

Finding it again.

What I’ll share here are the conversations, practices and discoveries that are helping me remember something I suspect many of us have forgotten:

That creativity isn’t a reward for becoming extraordinary.

It’s one of the ways we become fully human.

If you’re also learning to trust your own hands, your own voice, your own curiosity… I’d love for you to walk with me.

I have a feeling we’ll discover far more together than either of us could alone.