The following is a conversation between a buyer and the artist; reproduced with permission from the buyer.
Sam: How did you get into painting? Did you always paint or was this something that just happened spontaneously?
Nathan: I sketched a lot as a kid. In sixth grade, during summer vacation, I’d sit in front of the television and sketch floor plans of imaginary homes for hours. I never really painted though. I took an art class as a senior in high school, but that was about it.
Sam: So where do you think it came from?
Nathan: It has to be from the unconscious. I have no formal training. The art class I took, I’ll never forget that because the teacher asked me if she could show the class my work. Of course, I said yes! I wanted to impress her and my classmates. The next day she holds my art in front of everyone and tells them, “This is an example of someone who would be rejected from an art school.”
Sam: Wow!
Nathan: Yeah, that hurt. That stung for a long time. I had no idea she was holding up examples of who would and would not make it in the art world. That was cruel.
Sam: Really cruel. Did that make you want to abandon art? What did you do after that?
Nathan: I think I disconnected for a while. It was humiliating as you can imagine. Here was this authority figure—someone I really admired and respected and valued—shaming me in front of my peers. It was this small moment in time, but it had a lasting impact. I think I gave up for a while. The need to paint…I don’t think that went away.
Sam: Obviously, not! So, after high school, what did you do? Did you go to art school or….
Nathan: I wanted to go. In fact, I took those same pieces and presented them to an art school in San Francisco. The school accepted me that day, but I knew my parents would refuse. They did. It was another devastating experience, but I forced myself to accept it. In that moment, it was as if my goal, this dream, drifted into the sky. It didn’t die, but it did leave me. It went on vacation somewhere. Probably back into the unconscious—the only place it could go.
Sam: That’s interesting because you kept experiencing rejection but you tolerated it. Why didn’t you just forget the whole endeavor and become an accountant?
Nathan: I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be. I knew I could sketch and paint and produce art, but I didn’t know who I was fundamentally. Every survivor of dysfunctional or abusive families, well, the ones who have reached out to me and shared their experiences, has this same identity confusion. You have to hide parts of yourself or diminish yourself to stay safe from whoever is inflicting the threat to your personhood. When a parent, or whoever, is threatening or mistreating you perpetually, you lack the autonomy and the agency—and basic interpersonal safety—to express yourself and explore yourself and your ideas, your mind, the function of your brain and your consciousness.
Sam: I take it your family was dysfunctional?
Nathan: Dysfunctional. Abusive. I won’t repeat what my therapists have said, the diagnoses, but if you imagine growing up next to two giants who lack empathy, who lack remorse or any sense of guilt… if you rely on two people without a conscience for your survival…. You understand what I’m saying? I only knew how to survive. I couldn’t see beyond the next day because I was just trying to survive the present moment. Art was an escape. I think that’s why a lot of my work is ethereal or, as Grace Hightower put it, ‘cosmic.’ I wanted to be somewhere beautiful and peaceful and otherworldly. I wanted to transcend, so a lot of the paintings—maybe all of them—express the idea of transcendence; that the viewer will leave their present condition and mentally travel, experience this other world that is enriching and fulfilling and glorious.
Sam: Wait, how in the world did Grace Hightower see your work?! Who else has seen it?!
Nathan: That’s a story! Grace is amazing. She is one of the nicest, warmest, most intelligent people. I was unemployed at the time, and this staffing agency contacted me about working for a family here in New York. I was desperate, of course, so I said yes. The staffing agency did not reveal the family’s identity, so I just met this mom in Central Park for the interview. I didn’t know who she was, but during the interview she kept talking about esoteric ideas like the Law of Attraction, manifestation, and so on. And I’m thinking, okay…well, does your son want mac’ and cheese or not?! Haha! It was the strangest interview I had ever experienced. We parted ways, but the ideas she shared that afternoon stayed with me. Like seeds, she planted these ideas and concepts in the garden of my mind and they went underground into the unconscious. So, fast forward, and I am still struggling financially, well, in every way, really, and I am behind on my bills. My roommate at the time was antagonizing me daily. I’d wake up to these aggressive texts on my phone. I actually developed symptoms from that. I would avoid my phone. I would shake every time it pinged. My heart had palpitations getting notifications. It was horrible to live that way.
Sam: He was aggressive because of money?
Nathan: Yeah, but he was combative to begin with. He would insult our other roommate’s cooking. He would stay up with loud guests when we were trying to sleep, and if we ‘complained’ about it, he would gaslight or manipulate or just threaten us. Obviously, I wanted to move, but I was broke. Anyway, because of the financial hardship, I started painting. The seeds that Grace had planted in the form of those ideas and concepts were growing, and I was enacting those ideas, embodying them, if you will, on the canvas.
Sam: How did you sell them?
Nathan: I didn’t even have a website! I was so anxious and depressed; I figured no one would even visit a site if I made one. I just started posting online on various sites and slowly, incrementally, one-by-one, people would buy. It was astonishing. Now, we’re not talking a lot of money. But I could pay bills which felt liberating. I could satisfy some financial needs and stop the harassment from the roommate and creditors and so on. My nervous system…it must have had such high cortisol levels because the whole experience was one adrenalized stress after another. I was chronically in fight-or-flight, or freeze-or-fawn. There was no escape, except, it seemed, through the worlds I made on the canvas.
Sam: Interesting how, again, there’s this theme of escape. It’s as if once again art was a way to transcend the world rather than confine yourself to it—because it was so miserable.
Nathan: Oh, definitely. Reflecting on it now that seems like that was what was unfolding. I kept making art and finding that people kept buying. It was so rewarding not just financially, because at that time it wasn’t substantial, but it was so rewarding in terms of the dopamine from each sale, and the corresponding self-esteem and self-worth that came from acquiring value from my own talent. And, of course, self-actualizing. I never had that opportunity growing up. My parents had no interest in me as a person and certainly not in my art. In fact, I came home from school one day and my window was open. I looked out and saw my possessions all over the yard. My dad had thrown out my belongings in a fit of narcissistic rage. Like I said, it wasn’t safe to have my own agency in the house, living with them. I used to read psychology and neuroscience books and have to hide them under my bed because science was threatening to them. Growing up, just the sound of their footsteps made my heart palpitate. Their moods were unpredictable and they got tremendous enjoyment out of disrespecting me.
Sam: That’s horrible. It must have felt amazing to have people buy your work after all that family trauma and then the roommate turbulence.
Nathan: You better believe it! I eventually got out of that dysfunctional, shared apartment and moved in with a true friend elsewhere in New York. I kept painting and had a website and really developed myself over the next couple of years. The employment situation was volatile. The market was volatile. New York was volatile! But I kept going. So, one night, I’m on Google Discover and this article appears. It’s about Robert De Niro. I had no conscious idea why I read it. I don’t follow any news about any actors. Yet, I read it until the end. All of a sudden, the article shows a picture of his spouse, and she looks like someone I’ve met. I can’t remember where we met though. Why does she look familiar? Was she a resident in a building I frequented? Who was this vaguely familiar person? I searched my inbox. Oh my God. It was her! Grace Hightower. We had met in Central Park almost three years prior when she interviewed me and shared the ideas and concepts that bloomed into the art studio. This idea to reach out to her came to my consciousness. There was no guarantee if she would remember me or if she even used that email anymore. But I messaged her with gratitude because the content of her speech that afternoon shifted the trajectory of my life. A few days later, she responded—and she remembered me! We emailed for a while, then texted, then eventually spoke on the phone. She was so passionate about the art, and so wise, just about life. It was obvious she had empathy, integrity, and authenticity.
Sam: She sounds wonderful. It sounds like you two really bonded.
Nathan: Yes, I just can’t say enough about her character. It was obvious from her emails and then over the phone how genuine and decent she was. You know when you just feel the positivity from someone. You can sense when someone is pure. She came over and was enamored with the art and bought several paintings. That was one of the proudest days of my life, especially because she treasured them and picked up on the themes of the subject matter. She wasn’t shallow or superficial about it. She analyzed the color schemes, the patterns, the textures. Somehow, she correctly interpreted the story and meaning behind each movement. In other words, she understood the mental state that produced the imagery, probably more than I did at the time!
Sam: You went from your dad throwing your work into the trash to so many people valuing your work in their homes. That’s really something. That’s got to feel like vindication or justice of some kind.
Nathan: Yeah, I think…well, justice, yes, but hopefully this inspires people. Hopefully, this message motivates people to persist despite whatever suffering, whatever torment or hardship arrives. We all have suffering. We all have experienced loss, disappointment, failure, and so on. We’ve all been betrayed in some capacity. It’s safe to say my story is relatable for many people so maybe it will encourage others to empower themselves out of abusive relationships or unhealthy connections or whatever they may be enduring. Maybe it will provide a vision so that they can ultimately liberate their consciousness.
Sam: At the risk of sounding like one of those superficial people, is there anyone else who follows you work that you’d like to discuss?
Nathan: You're talking about…?
Sam: Anyone else I’d recognize.
Nathan: Paris Hilton and then Kathy Hilton followed me on social media—that was humbling! They saw the paintings and got involved. Talk about a rush of dopamine! Again, I was not an ‘influencer.’ I was just someone trying to survive in excruciating circumstances putting myself out there. That’s the power of Attraction. Keep putting yourself into the world in a pure way. It’s not enough to dream about it; with manifestation, you take action. You get the momentum going and flowing.
Sam: Wow! Did they know you?
Nathan: No way. I had never met them. We had no mutual relatives or friends. It was shocking to look at my phone and see Paris then Kathy follow me. My heart was palpitating from the notifications, but this time for good reasons! Camille Grammer, who was on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills also followed and re-tweeted one of the paintings, the sunflower one that sold to a collector in Salt Lake City. Camille has been really sweet and kind. Kathryn Edwards, who was also on the show, followed me on both Twitter and Instagram. Kathryn and I message and she’s one of the most interesting people. She admires the paintings and consistently leaves supportive messages. She’s also someone with a lot of integrity. She and her spouse support many worthy causes helping the elderly and the forgotten. There are many great people in the world with good hearts.
Sam: I think you would be one of them.
Nathan: Thank you. I try. One of my commitments to myself was to be the opposite of the people who surrounded me growing up.
Sam: What else influenced you? I’m asking this because, at least to me, when I saw your work, I got the feeling that maybe you painted to music. The paintings have a ‘musicality’ to them. For example, the way some objects will be fluttering or gliding up and down. There is tremendous movement in the images. Nothing sits still. Where did that come from?
Nathan: Yes! Absolutely! I always, always, always paint to music. I put in my earbuds and let the melody, the harmony, the lyrics flow in and through me. Music is art put to words, and art is language put to images. I ‘speak’ through the paintings in words otherwise unspeakable. It’s as if my brain, my mind is trying to communicate what it cannot otherwise say. The painting becomes a story, an experience. For example, the painting—the most abstract one so far—with the bare canvas and one black line that starts at the top and winds its way down to the bottom of the canvas…that’s called “Settling Down.” The line starts small at the top because it represents birth. As it travels down the canvas, it accumulates width because we accumulate experiences. Finally, at the bottom, it settles into place, because, ideally, we’ve discovered who and what we are. The reason it curves so much is because, as in baseball, life throws us curve balls; we get surprises and shocks to our system. This is the chaos of life. So, yes, even though it looks like some random line, it has a story, a narrative. This is probably why it sold quickly; people picked up on the meaning. The buyer could ‘speak the language’ of the piece. She understood it, so she connected with it and bought it. It might be…I don’t know this for certain…but it could be that art, or at least my art, is a kind of ‘body language.’
Sam: In what sense?
Nathan: In the sense that the content on the canvas is an expression of a mental-body state. I move all over the floor when painting. My whole body—arms, hands, fingers, you name it—is part of the process. I don’t sit still and paint. I stand, walk around, move the canvas around the floor or onto a wall, and then back to the floor. It is kind of like musical chairs! I’m almost doing a kind of ‘dance.’
Sam: While you're listening to music?
Nathan: Yeah, always.
Sam: And what kind of music can entrance someone like that?
Nathan: Every genre. Soundtracks. Dance Pop. Classical. I’ve painted to the transcendence of Sarah Brightman, Kylie Minogue, and Mariah Carey. Their voices are otherworldly. Sarah Brightman’s Harem and Classics will lift anyone into the heavens. With Kylie, I’ve listened to “Chocolate” so many times because it is pure poetry. The lyrics are a gentle wind that takes you airborne and the melody and harmony are the stars you see in the distance, guiding you with their soft light. I’ve fallen asleep to that song most of my life. Listen to it at bedtime, with your eyes closed, and watch your imagination. It’s a gentle psychedelic. With Mariah, well, just about every song! When I need to cry, to celebrate, to contemplate…there’s a song for that. All three of them actually. Kylie’s Homecoming album after she beat cancer and returned to her hometown of Sydney, that album is otherworldly. Harem is a safari for your ears. Sarah Brightman is truly one of the greats.
Sam: I’m familiar with some of those and I agree, you know you're in the presence of greatness.
Nathan: Totally.
Sam: What is your definition of beautiful art?
Nathan: I can’t answer that in any objective way. What is “beauty” anyway? One society or civilization has a given concept, another has a different concept. It also depends on language. The idea of “beauty” is culturally relative, historically contingent, and socially constructed. So, all I can say is I paint what feels good to see, to be around, to surround myself with—and that is Nature and the unconscious. A lot of people ridicule Freud and his ideas, but as one of my professors mentioned, “He discovered the unconscious, and that’s enough.” I agree with that, and so does contemporary neuroscience. There’s substantial research that supports Freudian ideas, such a reaction formation, psychosomatization, and so on. The book by Dr. John E. Sarno, The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mind-Body Disorders is powerfully enlightening and freeing. It demonstrates through clinical data the connection between the unconscious part of our brain that holds our deepest feelings, experiences, and so on, and the rest of our body and how symptoms emerge and wreak havoc. The body always speaks. Do you know that famous book The Body Keeps the Score? Or perhaps that quote, “If the eyes do not weep, the other organs will”? That’s the idea. I paint from the unconscious, spontaneously. I sit in front of an empty canvas with no foresight. I just start moving paint around and allow the unconscious to process, to say or ‘sing’ what it needs to…. I allow it to express itself so it’s not repressed anymore; so that the content of my experiences, my life, have an object to fixate on—the canvas. I’m not trying to paint “beauty” anymore than you are trying to breathe “beautifully” right now. It just happens. Many times, I become frustrated. Sometimes, I cry. I can’t even explain it, but I recognize it’s a kind of processing without words. Most of the paintings have paintings underneath. The piece, it was the biggest piece I ever did at the time, “The Love of My Life,” had four paintings underneath. It took months because one painting would emerge and it wouldn’t feel complete; I would paint over it and that new imagery did not communicate properly either. I always paint until every last ‘word’ of paint has spoken. Then I know the canvas is done, like the end of a song. Musicians and song-writers probably experience this same dynamic. I’m not sure.
Sam: When you say ‘Nature’, are you talking about the natural world as it is or your version of it?
Nathan: A transcendent version. If you notice, every painting of flowers or flower-like objects are floating, soaring, gliding. None of them is stationary or in the ground…that’s because in my imagination, in my unconscious, flowers are free to flutter about in the way that butterflies do. There is a unification of Nature; flowers look like and are surrounded by galaxies. This is just science though. You can’t have a flower in real life without having a galaxy first. Flowers are made of atoms and molecules. We are made of atoms and molecules. There are about 100 trillion atoms in each of our cells. That’s wild! So, I’m trying to visually demonstrate this relationship, this unity of all objects in the universe while still re-arranging relationships or producing novelty. Flowers do not bloom in the sky in the natural world, but in my imagination, in this kind of world, they transcend physical boundaries and limitations and they do bloom in the sky. And again that theme of unity emerges in terms of the unconscious. Most of us, myself included, struggle to access those inner parts of ourselves that do not normally emerge, other than, say, through symptoms or particular behaviors that the Self may not be aware it’s doing. This is why psychoanalysis is so liberating—challenging—but liberating; you are in a safe, healthy environment with a trained professional who recognizes what is supposed to be secret from your own awareness.
Sam: It’s fascinating. I can see a lot of that in the pieces.
Nathan: Thank you, Sam. It’s a learning process. I’ve acquired this knowledge from spectacular professionals like Dr Ramani on YouTube—she’s the leading expert in personality psychology. Kris Godinez was actually the first person I found online with knowledge about narcissistic dynamics. It saved my life in many ways. Literally, it empowered me to stay as safe as possible while living in a psychological landfill. Lewis Howes is brilliant. He talks about surviving abuse as a child and now is in the top podcasts of all time. His guests are equally impressive and all of that knowledge is free. And Mel Robbins. She was $800,000 in debt, drinking herself to sleep, totally incapacitated…. Now she is the top self-development practitioner. She speaks at the biggest companies in the world. I listen to every episode because, again, it’s about transforming the unconscious. Art is one way to get in touch with that, but there are other ways, too. All I know is I want the art to speak and in doing so, transform someone else’s unconscious so that it, in some way, even small, can speak its mind.
Sam: I’ll check them out. I’m always interested in self-development. Now, talk about abstract narrativism. What is that exactly?
Nathan: It’s a term I use to classify my work. On one hand, there’s the abstract side. That would be the ambiguous shapes, the part of the imagery that your brain can’t identify, at least not immediately or consciously. On the other hand, there’s the more obvious side—that’s where the story or the narrative comes in. It’s more discernible. It’s apparent what the content is. The two combine to tell a story that is simultaneously obvious and hidden, definite and ambiguous. I think I’ve painted this way because, for me, the human experience—the social world—always contained obvious rules alongside hidden ones. Growing up, it was obvious that you had to speak in a certain way, walk in a certain way, behave…you had to present your identity in a certain way to function. Yet, there unwritten rules that everyone followed. If you think of it like a computer, there are hidden processes that go on without the user even being aware of them.
Sam: Can you give me some examples?
Nathan: I’d say…take ethnic identity or gender identity. I observed people growing up, and nobody talked about it, but you had to wear certain clothes and not others. You were just supposed to obey the rules of dressing and if you didn’t, someone—or a bunch of someone’s—would punish you. Insult you. Threaten you. It was disturbing and fascinating to me. People would literally bully you, stop being your friend, or worse, physically violate you, over a piece of cloth or the smallest hand gesture or if you deviated from the expected vocalization. It utterly fascinated me. And no one ever said out loud…no one ever spoke of the rule underneath. Everyone was just supposed to conform to a narrow, rigid idea—but never talk about this organizing principle, this idea! So, I was always fascinated by social psychology and anthropology. Any civilization, any group of humans, has obvious parts and hidden parts of the social order. You must obey, conform, and so on. That’s obvious. But you also must hide or disguise or ignore the reason you must obey and conform. In terms of the human brain or mind, it’s the same. Around 95% of thought is unconscious. We’re only aware of around 5 percent, maybe 10 percent maximum, of what’s happening in us, around us, and more. So, we are a kind of abstract narrative. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves without even knowing every part of ourselves. Money is another great example. The historian Yuval Noah Harari calls money the greatest story ever told. You take these strips of useless paper, put some ink on it, and as if by magic, it becomes more valuable than any other object in the universe. Now, that is abstract narrativism!
Sam: How so?
Nathan: Because money is useless in-and-of itself. You can’t eat it if you are starving. You can’t drink it if you are thirsty. But it is an object that we all believe in. The story we tell ourselves about money is the obvious part. The hidden part is why. Why do we tell ourselves this story about a strip of paper that we cannot eat or drink? Why do some humans have mountains of the stuff and others go a lifetime without it? Why are we not allowed to question this, to analyze it, to probe into this rule? This just fascinates me because we are supposed to stay on the surface of the social order. We aren’t supposed to investigate why systems, structures, and institutions—these groups of humans with a shared goal—function the way they do. I can’t think that way, on the surface. I want to know why. What ends up happening when you stay on the surface is people mistake their civilization for universal human experience. But we are all having a mediated experience. Our brains filter the external world: ignoring some parts and exaggerating others. The actual part of the brain that does this is the reticular activating system. Our experience is mediated through language, too, through our beliefs and perceptions. You can’t believe in something for which there is no word.
Sam: That’s true. I want to ask what advice you would give someone who wants to paint for a living or go into the arts in some way.
Nathan: People say, “Follow your heart!” or “Do what you're passionate about!” but that’s vague. What if your heart has been so abused you don’t even know what you're capable of doing? What if your passion was forbidden or devalued? I would say get in touch with your unconscious. Imagine you pay for a cruise, you're on the ship, and the announcement says that the captain will pick a new destination at random—you're not going to the destination you thought. Now, you're on a cruise in the middle of the ocean with no idea where you're going. Terrifying, confusing, right? But that’s life if you don’t get in touch with the ‘captain’ of your cruise—your unconscious; otherwise, you drift through the world. And let me tell you, there are plenty of people who will be sadistically happy to tell you who you are. How do you think I got involved with those antagonistic roommates? If you don’t know the hidden parts of yourself, others will, and they will steer the ship of your life into storms. They will tell you stories about yourself because you’re not writing your own narrative; or, the narrative you do have of yourself is so self-limiting or self-defeating that they exploit you. So many people live, well, they don’t live, they survive, this way. I was one of them. If I can prevent even one person from experiencing the world as a minefield, that’s a victory. Get in touch with your own abstract narrative. We all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. Ask yourself, “What story am I telling myself about myself that I don’t even know I am telling myself?” Your unconscious—whatever is in there, the content of your unconscious—is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. We are all responsible for transforming our pain into progress, into power.
Sam: How so?
Nathan: Because we choose to end the cycle or repeat it. I’ve known many people who were in their 60s, 70s, one almost 80, still repeating and reliving the past (and making everyone else miserable in the process). Again, Freud discovered this about the human condition and called it the repetition compulsion: the tendency to replicate the past in the present in order to resolve it. The names change, but the type of person we get involved with is the same. We swap identities of those around us but not personalities. This is why you hear people lament that they keep getting in unfulfilling relationships over and over again and don’t understand why. Our primary caregivers, whoever raised us, left imprints in our brains. That’s the model of human behavior we get, so we run around the world with a model in our mind of how relationships ought to be. We do what is familiar. We think it’s universal. This is the story we tell ourselves in the unconscious, and then we wonder why we have the life we do. Well, who is steering your ship? If you don’t know who you are, someone will tell you. So, if a person has the resources, the best way to explore their story, their narrative, is with a professional.
Sam: A therapist?
Nathan: A psychoanalyst, a trauma-informed therapist, anyone trained about the unconscious. A professional who has the training to see your narrative when you can’t. If this isn’t feasible, there are many professionals on YouTube giving away their knowledge for free. Dr. Ramani is excellent. Bob Proctor is excellent. When I got to New York, I couldn’t afford psychoanalysis, but the universities had low-cost and no-cost programs and I made myself go. I wanted to heal because healing is about self-actualizing, and we all deserve to self-actualize. Self-actualization is the highest form of freedom, of liberation. Esther Hicks calls it alignment: when your inner being and every other part of you harmonize, flow, and synchronize. I didn’t paint, I couldn’t paint, until I removed those unconscious blocks—until I told myself different stories about myself and my abilities—and aligned with who and what I really was. Then the paintings flowed through me and onto the canvas; Law of Attraction did the rest.
Sam: I’ve been in therapy for several years and it was the best decision I ever made. Besides the art, do you have any projects you’re working on? What are you currently up to?
Nathan: I’ve finished a manuscript about narcissism, capitalism, and the will to survive. The second and third volumes are in the works. Those are focused on manifestation and mindset. They show how I went from being homeless to followed by the Hiltons.
Sam: You were homeless?!
Nathan: For several months when I first moved to New York. What happened during that time was extreme. But even when I finally got housing, what I still had to do to survive…it’s…. It was harsh.
Sam: If you’re comfortable, could you share an example? If not, I completely understand.
Nathan: New York is a grouping of extremes. I was scrubbing the floor—working this odd job to survive—of this business owner. She had a multi-million-dollar fashion company based in Los Angeles, and she purchased this $1.2 million apartment that she only used once per year. So, for eleven months of the year, it sat empty. And I’m scrubbing the floor while she is relaxing on the couch with her sister (they were in town for fashion week), and I’m hungry. I hadn’t eaten that day because I just paid rent for my bedroom. My roommate at the time—who I later discovered was sociopathic, by the clinical definition—would rage at night, so I could barely sleep. And I’d walk like a zombie to the job and clean and do whatever to make money to keep going. I’ve cleaned for a hoarder on Park Avenue. Have you seen the show “Hoarders”? She had a loft that felt like walking into Costco. Imagine Costco after an earthquake—that was her apartment. We had to walk through these narrow ‘aisles’ or passageways because she had crammed the apartment full of objects. The psychology behind hoarding is fascinating. She would have emotional meltdowns, and I had compassion for that, but then it got worse and what she did at the end was shocking.
Sam: What did she do?
Nathan: You’ll have to read! But yeah, I’ve been in so many apartments, hotels, you name it. I worked for someone with intense paranoia who believed people were breaking into the apartment and stealing old tape jackets—not the actual tape with the music, just the jacket. She was convinced her doctors were secretly poisoning her. I’d work for these people during the day then go research their conditions at the library. I could have a PhD by now! Everything I’ve learned is in these manuscripts: neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, economics. I’m sharing my story through the language of words and, of course, the language of art so it helps someone, even one person. That’s fine. As long as someone’s unconscious is reached. It’s healing for me, yes, but my goal is for all this work to align with the people it’s meant to reach. That's how you truly add value.
Sam: Nathan, this has been great. I’m glad we got to do this—finally! I wish you all the best with the writing and with the art.
Nathan: Thank you, Sam. Thank you for your purchase, for your comradery, and for agreeing to have this chat. I consider you more than a buyer; you're a friend at this point!
Sam: Likewise.