I’ve done a lot of work on my website recently.

It’s not just a blog anymore. Now you can find different categories to click through. Writing, Artwork, Photography, Videography and my Quest Board.

And this morning, sleep-deprived in Bangkok, I wrote an About-section that I’m very happy with. You’ll find it underneath! (Or by clicking the “About” button.

Now excuse me while I go get some breakfast.

The Person

Is this how you introduce yourself? 

I’m Adrian. 

I’m 31 years old, born in Oslo in 1995.

I’m a male specimen of the Homo Sapiens species according to most biology books.

I’ve been described as a strange mix between a knight and an aristocrat. 

ENTP 8w7

But that doesn’t really feel like an introduction to me. So before I get the idea to include my surname… Here’s the meaning of my name:

A – Artistic Author

D – Drifting Dreamer

R – Romantic Renegade

I – Iconoclastic Investigator

A – Archiving Adventurer

N – Narrative Navigator

Artistic Author

I’m an artist. I don’t usually like labels, except when I do, and this is one I’ve always liked.

I create art, not because I want to make money or be admired. (Though I’ll admit, admiration feels good when it’s earned.) I come from a long line of artists, art is in my blood. I also have lawyer blood, so I’m well-equipped to defend my definition of art.

Art is meaning. Creating is a way to move forward through time without feeling guilty for squandering it. Art captures, preserves, heals. Without creating something, I feel hollow.

I started painting a few years ago. 

I’m also an author. As a child, I spent countless hours writing stories, carried by an imagination that never seemed to run out. That spark faded for a while before being rekindled by someone who loved writing as much as I once did.

My novel Sealed Fate is finished, though it has yet to become a printed book. This website exists for much the same reason I returned to writing in the first place: I wanted a home for my words, and a reason to keep writing them.

Drifting Dreamer

When I was a child, I would fall asleep almost instantly, only to wake up on a train (one of those old-timey steam locomotives) drifting through space.

The dreams were lucid. I could control almost everything, including the plot. But I rarely did. I preferred to let my subconscious create the story I drifted through and spend my freedom on myself instead. I could fly, transform into anything, travel through time, cast magic. I could do anything I could imagine. A lucid dream in the hands of a child with limitless imagination is a true gift.

I suppose I never really left that train.

My head is rarely in the present. I’m usually wandering through futures that haven’t happened yet. Although I’m perfectly capable of making plans, I prefer to leave most things open-ended and see where they naturally lead. I drift into stories, hobbies, places, and romances. I rarely stay forever, but sometimes I find my way back.

I’m also dreaming of a better world. One where life is gentler on the innocent and the sensitive among us.

I don’t think drifting is synonymous with aimlessness. Some of the most meaningful parts of my life were never planned. I tend to discover more interesting things when I allow myself to wander instead of marching toward a destination.

Then again… some say I wing things that should not be wung.

Romantic Renegade

I never thought of myself as a romantic. The word carries a modern connotation that rubs me the wrong way. By romantic, I don’t mean helplessly in love, though that occasionally happens to be the case.

I mean it in the older sense of the word.

I mean wonder over cynicism. Longing over comfort. Beauty over utility. Mountains shrouded in mist. Forgotten ruins reclaimed by forests. Old locomotives drifting through space. Impossible dreams worth chasing simply because they’re beautiful.

I find meaning in the extraordinary, but just as often in the ordinary, which is easily found if only someone remembers to look.

I also occasionally write poetry when my heart is being torn asunder. But not the bad kind of poetry, don’t be alarmed. The modern connotations of poetry also make me a little uncomfortable.

If Romantic describes what I love, Renegade describes how I move through the world.

My first year of school, I was the teacher’s favourite. I followed the rules because I assumed the people who made them knew better than I did. Then I realized that teachers, like everyone else, could be unfair, unjust, and foolish.

I don’t rebel for the sake of rebellion. I’ve simply always struggled to follow paths that don’t make sense to me. I do what feels right according to my own internal compass, and the expectations of society have surprisingly little influence over where it points.

The past has a habit of trying to restrain the future. I’m a man of the future and I don’t like being restrained. I was bound to rebel against the world, in the world, for the world.

Rules deserve to be questioned rigorously. I’m not saying that murder is always ok, but I am saying that there’s a time and place for everything. 

Iconoclastic Investigator

Let’s pull out the dictionary for this one.

An iconoclast is someone who challenges traditional beliefs and cherished institutions. In other words, someone who fucking loathes dogma.

If the universe manifested before me and offered to permanently remove one thing from existence, I’d be tempted to choose dogma. I’ve thought through the consequences, and I genuinely believe about 95% of humanity would be dead within five years. I’d still have to think about it. Though I’d probably do the sane thing and answer, “Long-term childhood trauma.”

The truth is sacred to me, and very little else.

Many of the beliefs society rests upon deserve to be questioned simply because they’re inherited rather than examined. They can become outdated, unreasonable, or even immoral. Social constructs held together by our collective scaffolding.

I like to debate. To examine reality down to its foundations. To know not just what someone believes, but why they believe it. I’ll happily argue for positions I don’t even hold if it helps me better understand the opposing side.

If I’m given a fact without an explanation, I’m not satisfied. I want to know why it’s true. I suspect this comes from some epistemological obsession that I have little interest in curing.

Once, after surgery, I was told not to do something. Nobody explained why. So naturally, I did it. I fainted for the first time in my life and woke up to seven doctors looking down at me.

There’s also a great deal to investigate in life.

I founded a private detective bureau called Penumbra and an intelligence agency called NLI. Between them, they have at least one member. Possibly more.

I investigate mysteries because I enjoy demystifying the world around me. Places too, which is partly why I travel. And perhaps most interestingly of all, people.

Humans are, generally speaking, the most interesting animal known to humans. Some are surprisingly predictable. Others are incomprehensibly complex, infinite, and contradictory. Those are my favourites. I like discovering parts of people that no one else has seen. Reaching beyond every defence until I arrive somewhere genuine.

My investigative instincts might eventually drag me into journalism one day. Independent journalism, of course.

You know…

Iconoclasm.

Journalistic institutions.

Also, can the police stop telling me to stop playing private detective? It’s not a protected title, and I have a private detective hat.

Get off my back.

Archiving Adventurer

When I was five, I travelled around the world with my family for six months. Asia, Oceania, North America.

In Thailand I saw the world’s largest flower, the rafflesia. In Australia I saw a wild platypus. In New York I looked up at the Twin Towers from the back of a taxi, only months before they fell.

Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with travelling.

My soul, kissed by wanderlust, now writhes in anguish if I stay still for too long. I’ve been to around forty countries, and that’s not even close to enough. I want to visit them all.

Solo backpacking is my favourite way to travel. It offers maximum freedom, maximum adventure, and an endless supply of fascinating people. I’ve gone through some rough periods in life, and travelling has consistently been the best medicine. It renews me, energises me, and reminds me that the world is always bigger than whatever I’m carrying.

Naturally, I archive my adventures.

The first time I remember documenting a journey was in 2004 while I was in Thailand on the country’s western coast when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck. Through sheer coincidence, I was never in any danger, but I documented everything I learned about the disaster.

Years later, on my first solo backpacking trip, I picked up a camera and started sharing photographs. Before that, I hadn’t been particularly active on social media. In fact, I used to think selfies were rather narcissistic.

I’ve softened on that.

I’m remarkably forgetful, and because my mind spends so much of its time inhabiting the future, I don’t naturally hold on to the past. So I preserve it instead.

Photographs. Videos. Drawings. Writing.

I archive the moments that matter to me, giving them a form that can outlast time… at least for a little while.

Narrative Navigator

Stories are uniquely important, and uniquely human.

They’re how we explain who we are, where we’ve been, why we stay, why we leave, and why any of it mattered in the first place. Every person carries a story about themselves, whether they realize it or not. Some stories set us free. Others quietly imprison us. Writing a story for ourselves, one that empower us is the most important thing most people never learn.

I’ve always been fascinated by narratives. Not just the ones found in books and video-games, but the ones people unknowingly write every day. The stories families tell. The stories nations tell. The stories religions tell. The stories lovers tell each other. The stories we tell ourselves when we’re trying to make sense of a life that rarely makes sense while we’re living it. 

I don’t think life follows a plot. Not a conventional one.

But I do think we understand life through one.

Perhaps that’s why I naturally divide my own life into chapters. Why I build quests out of ordinary errands. Why I turn journeys into travel journals, photographs into memories, and memories into stories. Narrative is how I navigate the world.

In 2014 I experienced manic psychosis. The narrative I constructed tore me apart and rearranged me into something I could not recognize. And once I had time to recover, a new narrative put me back together again.

I rarely remember life as a sequence of dates. I remember it as chapters, characters, places, conversations, and turning points. The moments where the story changed direction.

If there’s a meaning to life, I suspect it isn’t something we discover.

It’s something we write.