Icarus rewritten : The Hard Way to Learn🌻

For a long time, I kept coming back to the story of Icarus.

It’s a story most of us know: he is given wings, he flies toward the sun, he gets too close, and he falls (longer version here). It is usually told as a warning about ambition, pride, or disobedience. But the part that stayed with me was something else. I kept thinking that maybe Icarus did not fail simply because he wanted too much. Maybe he failed because he rose too fast, with something he had not built for himself.

That thought became the starting point for one of my recent storyboard illustrations. Instead of retelling the story of Icarus directly, I chose a different character: a sunflower.

The sunflower does not receive wings. It does not suddenly gain access to the sky. It grows toward the sun slowly, through time, pressure, and experience. It becomes taller little by little. And even when it finally reaches high enough to meet the sun, its roots remain deep in the earth. That contrast became the core of the work for me.

What interested me was not only the image of reaching the sun, but the difference between arriving there through speed and arriving there through growth. One is immediate, dramatic, and fragile. The other is gradual, grounded, and sustainable. I think there is something deeply human in that difference.

We live in a time where fast success is often romanticized. We are constantly surrounded by stories of people who rise quickly, gain visibility quickly, achieve quickly. From the outside, that kind of ascent can look like the ideal path. But there is a question we do not ask often enough: what allows someone to stay there? Because reaching a certain height is one thing. Maintaining yourself there is another.

This is what the sunflower helped me express. Growth is not only about moving upward. Real growth happens in two directions at once. While one part of you rises, another part of you must go deeper. Ambition alone is not enough. It needs to be matched by stability, self-awareness, discipline, and experience. Otherwise, height becomes weight, and the fall becomes inevitable.

That is why, in my interpretation, the sunflower succeeds where Icarus fails. Not because it wants less, but because it grows enough to hold what it is reaching for. This idea also feels personal to me.

As a creative person, I do not feel that my journey has been about sudden flight. It has been about gradual formation. Practice, mistakes, experiments, curiosity, inconsistency, improvement, repetition — all of these things shape a person in ways that are less visible than success, but far more important. They create roots.

And roots matter.

They matter because they hold you in place when things begin to move. They matter because they give meaning to the height you eventually reach. They matter because without them, even the most beautiful rise can disappear as quickly as it came.

That is what I wanted this storyboard to say.

Not that we should fear the sun. Not that ambition is dangerous. But that some things should be grown into, not rushed toward. That becoming ready is its own kind of achievement. That building yourself slowly is not a weakness, but a strength.

In that sense, this work is my answer to Icarus.

Not everyone needs wings. Some of us need roots. Some of us need time. And some of us reach the sun not by flying, but by growing toward it.

And now, I am grown enough to hug the sun, still rooted in who I was🌻!