In my thirties, I rarely let life get the better of me. I was—in my own estimation—in firm control. Nothing could touch me. I was fitter back then. Younger and fitter; I believed myself invincible. I rose above all earthly concerns. Trivialities, constraints, and laws were no match for my ability to bench press 180lbs, execute perfect pistols (one-legged squats to the laymen out there), and run savage wind sprints that’d make most people vomit out their entrails. My worries were of the esoteric kind back then, like: how to become a successful artist. How to crack the creativity code. To that end, I drank five cups of coffee, carried around a leather-bound notebook à la Hemingway, and spent a fortune on a Montblanc pen in hopes of coating my thoughts in a thin veneer of credibility.

Then came April 13, 2014.

I had traveled to Amsterdam to participate in a month-long artist residency at the renowned Binger Film Lab. The program was filled with bright, successful filmmakers from neighboring European countries, and in their bohemian company, I felt my life was finally on the upswing. I was learning to trust myself, finding my voice, and believing that maybe, just maybe, I could direct films for a living. During that time, I formed close friendships with two other directors, and together we organized weekly five-a-side indoor football matches. Every other Sunday, we’d come together for a casual kickabout and bicker about how one’s favorite club was going to trounce the other’s later that evening.

On one such day, the opportunity to play center midfield presented itself—a position rarely offered to me during my more competitive days, since I was surrounded by extremely talented teammates and was summarily passed over. I loved playing center-mid because it allowed one to control the game’s tempo, to marshal the players back and forth, orchestrating the perfect attack and organizing the defense when the team was under pressure. As someone obsessed with having control over every aspect of life, the role would give me the fleeting illusion that I could predict the outcome, spot potential pitfalls, and steer the game like a puppet master.

And so we began; the game in full swing—a helter-skelter rhythm synonymous with amateur pickups. Five minutes in and an opposition attack was comfortably snuffed out, the ball resting in our goalie’s arms, who in turn rolled it to my feet. I turned toward the opposing goal and executed a quick one-two past a defender before embarking on a slaloming run through the middle. With the ball on the outside of my right foot, all I could think about was threading the pass to our winger, who was about to break down the right channel.

I glanced up for a millisecond, spotted his raised hand, and wound up to launch a diagonal ball that would release him down the flank—when suddenly I felt a flutter in my chest, like water coming to a boil. My breathing grew ragged and erratic, and I stopped running. The ball rolled on without me, landing under the boot of an opposing player.

Someone on my team yelled, “What the hell are you doing?” But I couldn’t respond. My head spun, and my heart hammered inside my chest. I sat down to steady myself while batting off attempts at commiseration: “You alright?” “Everything cool?” I thought, “I mustn’t let on there’s something wrong; I mustn’t remove the sheen of unassailability.” And so I sat, submerged in total dread and delirium, my head spinning and heart sprinting, feeling like I was drowning in a pool. I kept saying, “Yeah, all good. Nuttin’ wrong.”

Far from true.

Over the next decade, I visited multiple hospitals and cardiologists, underwent a slew of tests, and received as many different diagnoses—none of which brought any real relief or clarity. It would take twelve years for me to finally see an electrophysiologist and get a solid diagnosis: supraventricular tachycardia, a type of cardiac arrhythmia caused by an electrical anomaly that leads to episodes of terrifyingly accelerated heart rhythms appearing out of nowhere. As a result of the condition, I grew hypervigilant, checking and rechecking my pulse obsessively, stopped working out, stopped playing football. I left behind the self I had come to sculpt and know over three odd decades and began to slip into the skin of a new, foreign self.

I stopped living.

In those intervening years, my mental health suffered drastically. The visceral nature of each SVT episode made it feel frighteningly final—always two erratic beats away from, “Farewell, my buddy, my pal.” I developed a panic disorder, haunted by the reality that I could die at any moment—today, tomorrow, next week, or a decade from now. Death was no longer an abstract inevitability; it was an unassailable, ever-present possibility. While clinging on by a thin thread, I was white-knuckling my way through one film project after another—mere distraction I thought, but better than staring face in the eye. 

As I grappled with my new reality, I began to look for answers: seeing a therapist, attending mindfulness meditation groups, and learning Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Finally, after years of searching, I found solace in the works of Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, whose ideas resonated deeply with my experience. Rank’s central thesis in his book, Art and Artist (1932), is that the awareness of mortality is the fundamental driver of all artistic and cultural expression. He argues that humans, confronted with the inevitability of death, strive to transcend their finitude by creating works that outlast them, seeking symbolic immortality. 

For Rank, “the artistic reaction is…indistinguishable from the neurotic overcoming of the trauma or the potentiality of inhibition resulting therefrom, no matter whether this is achieved by a single effort or spread over the whole life-work.” In other words, neurosis is not a conflict rooted in repressed instincts (as Freud believed) but a failure of individuation—a blocked expression of the creative will. The artist, in contrast, channels this will to achieve both personal individuation and a symbolic defiance of death. For me, the abrupt intrusion of SVT—and the looming possibility of death—thrust these ideas from distant theory into living reality. Suddenly, mortality wasn’t something that happened to other people or in another lifetime. It was here, and it demanded my attention.

I remember speaking to a close friend over the telephone, fighting through tears after I’d begun to tell him about my unrelenting struggles with panic attacks and anxiety. He heard my brittle voice, hitched breaths cutting sentences into fragments, and with tender awareness pointed out how, in his view, my heightened fear of death had placed me in a dizzying sprint of creative project after project, leading to a maddening attempt at transcending mortality.

His thoughts rang true. In fact, they echoed Ernest Becker’s ideas in his seminal work, The Denial of Death (1973). Becker introduces the concept of the “immortality project”—the idea that humans engage in creative, cultural, and heroic pursuits as a way to achieve symbolic immortality. Art, in this context, becomes a means of defying death by leaving a lasting imprint on the world. Becker traces human behavior and motivation to our unique cognitive complexity—the very thing that sets us apart from other animals. Our ability to imagine future events, to dream up scenarios untethered from the present, opens the door to a host of anxieties, chief among them the fear of death. This fear, he argues, compels us to eternalize our lives through “immortality projects.”

Rank explored similar ideas in his book, arguing that religion and creative pursuits can serve as ways to outlive our physical bodies. In that regard, I like Professor Sheldon Solomon’s take on Rank’s ideas. I’m paraphrasing him here, “by way of consciousness we realize that we’re temporal representatives of the cosmic primal force”—a phrase that captures the spirit of Rank’s thinking by highlighting how, through our consciousness, we perceive that we’re all descendants of the first living entity, sharing the same finite existence and, faced with the inevitable, striving for cosmic transcendence.

This interpretation resonated deeply with me. In my decade-long battle with a heart condition, I’ve come to see human consciousness as profoundly dual: it not only helps us navigate the physical world but also allows us to grapple with the depth and mystery of our existence. The more aware we become of our fragility, the more urgent the desire to immortalize it.

And yet, I’ve come to realize that control, like the role of center midfield, is ultimately an illusion. On the pitch, I once believed I could orchestrate every pass, every tackle, every moment of the game. But life, like football, is unpredictable. The ball doesn’t always go where you intend it to, and sometimes, your body betrays you. What matters isn’t controlling the game—it’s learning to play it, even when the rhythm is broken and the stakes are terrifyingly high.

In the face of my mortality, I’ve come to see creativity not as a means of escaping death, but as a way of embracing life in all its fleeting beauty. And just as I once stood at the center of the pitch, marshaling players and predicting plays, I now stand at the center of my own existence, no longer trying to control every outcome but learning to move with the chaos, to find meaning in the unpredictability.

The game goes on, and on and on…till the final whistle sounds.