Fill a room until the self disappears.

Yayoi Kusama has lived by choice, since 1977, in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, and walks to her studio across the road each morning to work. She has said, plainly, that art is what has kept her alive. The polka dots that made her one of the most visited artists on earth began as something closer to terror, a childhood pattern of hallucination in which fields of dots spread across everything she saw until she felt she was dissolving into them.

Most people would have run from that experience. Kusama walked toward it. She decided that if the dots were going to obliterate her, she would obliterate everything else too, on her own terms, and call it art. She named the process self-obliteration, and she has been performing it for seventy years, in nets and dots and mirrored rooms that repeat a single small light into infinity.

Her Infinity Mirror Rooms are the clearest version of the idea. You step into a mirrored box, the door closes, and for a minute the distinction between you and the room stops holding. There is no floor, no edge, no scale. The queues to spend that minute now stretch around city blocks on every continent.

What is easy to miss, behind the selfies, is how hard-won this is. Kusama was dismissed for decades, a Japanese woman in a New York art world that took her ideas and gave the credit to men. She kept working anyway, through poverty and breakdown and being written out of her own story, until the world finally caught up to a vision she never once softened.

The lesson is uncomfortable and true. The thing that feels like it might destroy you, the obsession you cannot put down, is often the exact thing worth building a life around. Kusama did not overcome her affliction. She made it her medium.

Whatever pattern keeps returning in your work, stop fighting it. Follow it all the way in.