A Time of Review | Part 2

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A twelve-week review of bookbinding opens deeper questions about validation, meaning, and identity within constructed systems. The work clarifies how personal inquiry can exist apart from external lineage and marks a pivot point: pausing the craft to begin the long-awaited music project.

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Date: Sunday December 7, 2025

Ordinal: Week 13 | Day 91

Designation: Admin

A gnawing feeling, an intuition that when I paused for reflection on the past 12 weeks in the art of bookbinding a deeper, more personal review was encroaching. It was right. As long as I remained specifically within the boundaries of this 3-month window, I was unable to appreciate what I’m truly addressing, what answers I’m grasping at.

On the surface a deeply entrenched fear of the perception and judgment of others; most can relate to that. While validation is a common thread that connects us all, it is but one means to original thought. My meaning? It wasn’t until Vincent Van Gogh’s death that his place within the artistic sphere was validated. Conclusion: you can possess valuable experiences that exist independent of external validation; however you mold them, however you share them in the physical, analog world we inhabit.

Why? Group structures compete for the authority to define meaning itself. Artist schools, craft guilds, academic traditions, or digital subcultures; indeed, any and every knowledge center operates as a constructed reality system that preserves lineage by imprinting norms onto those who enter.

"This is the work and my expectations of what it should look like… a lie, a falsehood, an unattainable illusion.”

Can private meaning remain intact in the presence of systems that position themselves as arbiters of value? Is lineage required at all for meaning to be transferable? In the case of Van Gogh and those who share his outcome, value can exist long before a system recognizes it.

To choose a mode of inquiry, to follow that course as far as it naturally allowed and maybe even derive meaning from it; that was my goal. Bookbinding met a set of criteria:

• a point of personal interest, loosely or directly

• low-cost entry

• challenge skill-sets

• achieve a connective long-term goal

Prototype #4 has the potential of being the final iteration before the design stabilizes. Upon the documented refinements, the iterative experiences, my signature knowledge-storage device evolves from the realm of thought to an analog reality. For those who find interest, I’ll share the work as it stands.

But, am I a bookbinder? What does it mean to incorporate a discipline into one’s life without being subsumed by it? Can one engage with knowledge without feeling pressured to reshape identity around it and thus signal outwardly a socially validated experience to the human world?

“Fear remains, but so does a quiet confidence… I choose knowing over the comfort of truisms and platitudes.”

If I can interact with knowledge, any knowledge, without unduly amending identity, that’s what I desire most. Why does this inclination to flatten oneself for the digestibility of others exist, and why is it prevalent? Should we laud those who reach pinnacle status inside one discipline? What does that say of our value system toward multi-dimensional, cross-disciplined individuals?

Finally, in what way do these questions hold a mirror to the perception of self, and does it matter at all? I would internally define this as an organism-level dilemma. My response? Redirect the flow of entropy, for a time.

For the remainder of December I’m stepping back from bookbinding to pursue another facet of my creative work; my long-awaited music project.

“I have zero reservations with saying three little words: I don’t know.”