Society will often tell you what you can or cannot do. Who you can or cannot be. Reject that script. Build your own morals and your own meaning. There is a price for being different and we’re hardwired to try and fit in. Yet we must pay that price without flinching. The examples below are some that history remembers but there are countless others that it does not. That changes nothing. You stay unrelenting.

I first sat in a room full of Rothkos at MoMA in late 2006 or early 2007. I had come to New York with my family and somehow ended up in that room full of giant rectangles of color. I had no idea what I was looking at or who Mark Rothko was at the time. I sat there for what felt like eternity, staring at life-size fields of color that evoked a strong feeling, drawing me in for reasons I could not name. I just know it mattered because I have never stopped chasing that feeling since.

Most people encounter Apollo and Dionysus through Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, where they serve as shorthand for the duality between order and chaos, logic and feeling, the Apollonian dream and the Dionysian frenzy. Nietzsche argued that great art, and by extension great living, holds both without letting either win.