Be inspired without disappearing

Taking someone as a model is healthy. Wanting to become that person is much less so. The difference comes down to one question: am I drawing inspiration from their path, or copying their life?

Inspiration works through selective borrowing. You keep a discipline, a way of speaking, a way of getting back up. You leave the rest, because the rest belongs to another story, another context, another body.

Imitation is expensive. It asks you to erase the particularities that make you valuable. Wear someone else’s clothes long enough and you stop recognising your own shape.

Try this exercise: name three people you admire, then write down one single quality you want to cultivate from each. Finally, write what you have that they do not. That last column is your raw material.

No one can live in your place. That is both a constraint and an immense freedom.