One week ago I was on a beach in Crete, Greece, when I had a revelation that made me rethink my entire artistic journey. While listening to my discography to choose a soundtrack for my Instagram stories, I noticed something profound: the frequency of my creativity has drastically changed.

When I was in Potenza, music was my daily salvation. Hours on the keys, every day, driven by a compulsion I couldn’t ignore. The existential suffering of a boy trapped in a reality too small generated constant creative pressure. I had no choice, it was emotional survival.

Now that pressure is gone. And with it, the compulsive urgency to create has also disappeared.

Music chose to sacrifice itself for me.

For years, music lent itself to being my therapist, my confessor, my outlet. It accepted being instrumentalized, becoming a means to process pain instead of being an end in itself. It allowed itself to be loaded with the weight of my anxieties, my frustrations, my broken dreams.

And when I finally no longer needed it as an emotional crutch, music withdrew. Not out of abandonment, but out of love. It stepped aside, reducing its presence in my life, to allow me to truly heal.

Now it only comes when I have something genuine to say, no longer when I have something to process.

Is suffering really the most powerful engine of art?

It seems that pain is the most prolific fuel for human creativity.

Perhaps because suffering puts us in a state of hypersensitivity. When we suffer, we desperately seek a language to translate the unspeakable, and art becomes that language. Happiness, on the contrary, is self-sufficient; it doesn’t need to be translated or processed.

But there’s a paradox in all this. If art is born mainly from pain, does it mean that to be prolific we must remain unhappy? That emotional healing is the enemy of creativity?

My experience tells me no. Not entirely. What has changed is not the quality of my art, but its function. Before it was medication, now it’s celebration. Before it was processing, now it’s pure expression.

Music has accepted reducing its presence in my life because it knows that when it arrives now, it’s for nobler reasons. Not to heal wounds, but to share beauty. Not to empty emotional buckets, but to fill spaces with wonder.

It’s a sacrifice of love.

When inspiration decides to return, it does so not as necessity, but as a gift.

Perhaps this is the true sign of artistic maturity: when your art stops needing you to survive, and you stop needing it to heal. What remains is pure: the encounter between a fulfilled artist and his most authentic form of expression.