Hello, I’m A.P.Bastian
I’m a writer, multidisciplinary artist, and certified Soul Purpose Coach with a particular fascination for what happens when you stop living the life that makes sense and start paying attention to the one that makes you feel alive.
I know that territory intimately.
My own life has involved a law degree I barely used, several spectacular reinventions, moving across countries, starting over more times than I care to count, and eventually giving myself permission to take seriously the thing I had spent years treating as impractical: being an artist.
These days, when I’m not writing, photographing, painting, or following some creative idea farther than is probably reasonable, I mentor people who are trying to close that same distance between the life they know they want and the one they’re actually living.
MY WORK
Everything I make is somehow an attempt to understand the strange business of being alive.
I’m interested in the things we can’t always explain but somehow know: intuition, desire, grief, creativity, archetypes, the body, the unseen, the versions of ourselves we have to lose in order to meet the ones waiting underneath.
My first book, A Dirty Word Called Grief, came out of my first encounter with death and the startling realization of how little prepared most of us are for what comes after. I wanted to make something honest enough to sit beside someone in the ugly parts without trying to hurry them toward the light.
In 2023, I created MetamorphoZine, my newsletter and ongoing home for essays, poetry, and observations from whatever threshold I happen to be standing on. It began as a place to write about transformation. These days, it has become somewhere I write about life while I’m still in the middle of figuring it out.
My visual work moves between photography, self-portraiture, painting, and whatever medium the idea happens to demand. Lately, that has included bringing archetypes to life through elaborate photographic self-portraits—a practice that keeps teaching me that sometimes you have to make the thing before you understand what it came to tell you.
And then there is the work I do with other people.
Through 1:1 mentorship, I sit beside people who can feel that something in their life wants to move—creatively, personally, or both—and help them figure out what that movement might actually look like in the mess of a real life.
Different mediums. Same obsession, really:
How much of yourself are you willing to bring to life?
