Nothing Was Real, But Everything Felt True

You know those little thumbnails on my main page?
I used to generate all of them with AI.

Heck, I made a whole bunch for every post.
Not just one.
Dozens.
Each entry with its own tiny multiverse.

I’d type a few words,
barely a sentence,
and suddenly there it was.
A photograph that had never existed,
appearing like it had been waiting for me
just out of sight.

A man standing on a cliff,
wearing a monk’s robe,
watching missiles rain from the sky,
in the style of H. R. Giger.

Because why the hell not.

It felt electric.
Creativity without gravity.
No limits. No technique.
Just instant magic.
Like I was basically an artist now.

And God,
it felt amazing.

—

And then one day,
while generating images for my latest post,
something felt… off.

I kept going over the images,
making new ones again and again.
Dozens of them.
Somehow, it still didn’t cut it.

And yet every one of them was perfect.
Exactly what I pictured in my mind.
Beautiful.
Technically flawless.
Nothing I could improve.

So why did it feel wrong?

Did I type something wrong?
Was I asking for the wrong thing?
Was I the one messing it up?

So I reviewed everything I’d made this year.
Every thumbnail.
Every digital painting.
Every fake photograph.
And the truth was the same across all of them.

Rooms no one ever walked into.
Beds that never held a body.
Landscapes that never tasted wind.
Faces that never learned how to blink.

But the more I stared at the images,
the more I realised how empty it all felt.

It was like feeling nostalgia
for something I never experienced.

Then it hit me.
These images weren’t holding my feelings at all.
They just looked good.
Wallpaper-level good.
Art without story,
Beauty without heart.

Like I’d been conjuring ghosts.

Everything is real
but nothing is true.

—

And I think that’s what finally got to me.
This year has been full of things that looked real.
Felt real.

Comfort.
Meaning.
Intimacy.

But sitting there that afternoon
I felt it in my chest.
That weird, hollow ache
you get when the thing you’ve been holding
has weight
but no warmth.

And if I’m honest
it wasn’t just the images that felt that way.
There was something in that emptiness
I recognised a little too quickly.

That sense of almost.
That sense of close enough.
Things that felt real
right up until the moment I needed them to be true.

I didn’t notice it before.
Or maybe I did
and I just didn’t want to look at it.

But once I felt it
I couldn’t unfeel it.

—

So I opened Unsplash.

Typed: “abstract photography.”

And suddenly I was staring at moments
captured by people who saw something I didn’t.
People who felt something.
People who lifted a camera toward the world
because an idea moved them.

There was breath in those photographs.
A little bit of someone’s life
caught between shutter and skin.

These photographers did not know me,
but they were giving me something real.
A moment pulled out of time.
A feeling suspended in space.
Honest and unrepeatable.

And that was when I went back,
deleted all my generated images,
and replaced them.

It took a while.
Scrolling through tens of thousands of photographs
looking for the one that carried something I recognised.
A quiet ache.
A kind of truth I could feel
even if I could not name it.

And when I found those images,
they spoke to me.

Like I was borrowing someone else’s awe
and stitching it gently into my own stories,
into my grief, my longing,
my strange little universes
where people love each other in crooked ways.

A reminder that someone else, somewhere,
saw beauty before I did.

Maybe that is what art is meant to do.

Nothing was real
but everything felt true.

—

So this is a small thank you
to the photographers whose work I borrowed.
People I will never meet,
who saw something worth keeping
and pressed the shutter.

I don’t know what they were feeling in that moment.
I don’t need to.
Whatever it was
found its way to me.

Thank you
for letting me use your eyes
when mine were tired.
For giving me images
that held something true
when I needed it most.

And to you who read these pieces,
who return even when the stories are crooked
or heavy
or strange

thank you
for being here with me
this year.

It means more than I ever say out loud.

Merry Christmas,
and have a wonderful 2026.

Here are the photographs I borrowed,
and the people who made them.

Each image links back to their Unsplash page.
If you have a moment,
go see what else they’ve seen.