I feel the power to produce so strongly within myself, I’m aware that there will come a time when I’ll finish something good, so to speak, daily, and do so regularly.

At present hardly a day passes without my making a few things, but it isn’t yet what I really want.

Well — sometimes it seems to me that I’ll become productive very soon — I shouldn’t be surprised if it happens one fine day. I’ve an idea that in any case painting will also indirectly awaken something in me. Here, for example, is a scratch of the potato market in Noordwal. The bustle of workmen and women, with the baskets being unloaded from the barge — it’s a very interesting sight.

These are things I would like to paint or draw forcefully. The life and movement of such a scene, and the types of folk.

. . . It doesn’t surprise me, though, that I can’t do this straightaway, and that so far when I try I’ve often failed. Now, through painting, I’ll certainly become handier with colours, and better able to capture such a subject. Well, the point is to be patient and carry on working.

. . . I’m doing my very best to put all my energy into it, for I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort — and disappointment and perseverance.

- Van Gogh, letter to brother Theo, September 9, 1882

I'm not sure what it was that struck me so about my time in Amsterdam - many things, of course - but it was the dual experiences of the Van Gogh and Anne Frank museums that linger. Historically, contextually, their lives were very, very different. But it's what remains afterwards that we live off of, and that got me thinking about self-realization and legacy. Legacy is the wrong word, really - it brings to mind sweater-ed Yale students or something stuffy - but what I mean is, in the span of a few days I witnessed first hand what two very different but very well-known and prolific people left behind, and how that is interpreted. What stood out to me was the instance in which an individual realizes that they are going to make their mark.

Van Gogh's letters. Anne Frank's diary. Do people plan on being prolific?

It was the letter above in the Van Gogh museum that made me stop and think. Van Gogh is around 29 at this point. He's taken up painting rather late in his life by comparison. But this is one of the moments in his letters that I found most beautiful, because not only is he filled with this crescendoing sense of self and capability, he realizes just exactly what that will take. What the true stakes are to step into your full potential. Effort, and disappointment, and perseverance. Van Gogh is so damn relatable, even when he's begging Theo for money for the fiftieth time.

And Anne Frank - to be in your early teens and already have such unflagging belief in your desire to be a writer that you re-write an entire journal because you hear on the radio that they're planning on collecting diaries and other writings for the future. How many people start journals when they're young and actually follow through with them, much less edit them, curate them? She reminds me of the twelve and thirteen-year olds I worked with during summers in high school, young girls with abilities and ambition and something in them that seemed to exude this shimmering immortality.

I guess what I find most beautiful in the writing of both these individuals is self-realization. Which, in turn, forecasted or not, was a factor that led to their legacy being what it is.

Many people seem to worry about their legacy when it comes to death. How they'll be remembered. If they'll have made a mark, that sort of thing. Where you stand in relation to everything around you. Maybe I'll be more concerned with that concept when I'm older. Right now I seem to be more affected by the thought of attaining true self-realization - I already feel like 'legacy' has been covered in such a unique way by our ever-social and always-online generation. When do we as individuals look out across the whole of our existence and see something out there for us? And when do we realize what that something will take, and when do we start actually doing it. . .