“Where you don’t speak, your art becomes your voice”, I read that somewhere and kept thinking about it.
In 2015 I wrote a small fiction story. 58 to 60 pages about consciousness and how it moves through our lives. I had no references, no research, just a loose imagination and some free time. I did not tell anyone about it. I was not even sure what I was doing or why I felt the need to do it.
When I started thinking about publishing it, the doubt came in through the practical door. Who will read this? Why would anyone care? What is my target audience? I sat with those questions for a while and the answers that came back were a little embarrassing in how simple they were. I will read it. Someone might read it if they are curious about the way I think. There is no target audience, I was just writing for the pleasure of writing.
I published 内なる声の顔 in 2019 and quietly tucked it away. I did not promote it. I did not bring it up much. It felt too close to something personal to put on display.
Years passed. In 2024, almost by accident, I mentioned it to a group of people I know. A few days later a message came, then a voice note. Someone had read it and wanted to talk about it. I searched online half expecting nothing and found that a handful of people had already written about it on their own. I remember sitting with that for a moment, not knowing what to feel exactly.
A friend told me the book had connections to Jungian psychology. I had not studied Jung when I wrote it, had barely heard of him honestly. That comment sent me down a long road. I have been reading Carl Jung in my spare time since then, and somewhere in those pages I kept recognising things I had already felt, the way his ideas about consciousness connect to the philosophy of Dr. Nirmala Shrivastava that I had grown up around. It was strange to find that things I had written from instinct had roots I did not know about.
I kept my name off a lot of creative work for years. Video editing, book editing, various projects where I was more comfortable being in the background. At some point people started mentioning my name in creative conversations anyway and I did not really know how to feel about that either. I still do not fully know. It is an odd thing to be seen in a way you were not expecting. Then I came to know, “Creativity was not a skill, but that silent voice which I suppressed from being heard.”
Back to present, I work as a developer and consultant at AtoJ Hirameki and I run InnerVerge Media since January 2026. The technical work and the creative work sit side by side in my life and I am still figuring out how they fit together. What I do know is that the book I wrote alone in 2015, with no plan and no audience, is still out there doing something without me. Whatever that something is, it has very little to do with me at this point and that is probably the most honest thing I can say about it.
JA
