My biggest motivation is being the person who can still stay motivated despite all these hardships…
In other words, being Mert Karataş.
My motivation lives alongside an oxygen deprivation, cerebral palsy diagnosis, the years when I couldn’t walk, and the words I struggled to understand.
It isn’t something I ran away from; it’s a system I’ve had to live with.
And this page is exactly the answer to that:
“How does this kid keep creating through all of this?”
What does motivation mean to me?
For me, motivation isn’t a quote hung on a wall; it’s an infrastructure that runs on the nervous system, discipline, and curiosity.
- On one side: cerebral palsy, muscle tone, lack of drive, fatigue, pain…
- On the other: photography, music, sport, travel…
They don’t fight; they negotiate every day.
My job is to build systems that tilt that negotiation in my favor:
- Keeping the body standing through consistent training,
- Anchoring my attention in the moment through photography,
- Rewriting rhythm through music,
- Making sense of the whole process through writing.
My motivation isn’t built on “feeling great every day.”
It’s summed up more by this question:
“Did I improve the system by just one notch today?”
Photography: Motivation chasing the Northern Lights
There wasn’t a romantic “artist awakening” behind why I started photography.
There was a very clear, almost childlike sentence:
“I want to see the Northern Lights through my own frame.”
Even before my decision to move to Norway, this scene kept looping in my head:
A cold night, a dark sky, and a camera waiting on a tripod…
- For me, the Northern Lights aren’t just colors in the sky;
they feel like “the payoff for the struggle it took to get here.” - Each frame is a small reward from the long negotiation my brain has had with my body.
In the long run, photography feeds my motivation system in three ways:
- Purpose:
The scenes I want to capture keep me standing—both technically and physically. - Witness:
The frames I take are visual proof that says, “I really walked this road.” - Memory:
It lets me back up my mind externally—which makes my head feel freer.
In short, my motivation is less about “being a photographer” and more about “being able to chase the light.”
Music & Production: Turning APD into an advantage
Before producing, the story starts at the piano.
When I was young, guided by my mother, I started touching the keys to develop my hands.
Back then I didn’t realize it, but this was a critical investment for my nervous system.
In later years, auditory processing disorder (APD) settled deeply into my life.
In everyday life, it made understanding what people said harder.
But when it came to music, the picture changed.
- While words could scatter and slip away in conversation,
- a selective mind appeared—one that locks onto rhythm and melody.
That turned into an interesting advantage for me in production:
- I learned to simplify complex sounds,
- to isolate tiny details inside a beat,
- to feel the emotional weight of melodies more clearly.
While APD can look like an obstacle in daily life, in music it builds the background of this line:
“Because I don’t hear the world like everyone else, I build the pieces a little differently.”
That’s exactly where the music side of my motivation lives:
Turning what looks like a weakness into an original voice in creation.
Writing: When speech fell short, words stepped in
I’ve been trying to write since I was around 12.
Because of dysarthria, there were times I couldn’t fully express my sentences; the tone of my voice struggled to carry my thoughts. As the distance grew between what I wanted to say and what reached the other person, I naturally leaned into the page.
That’s why writing isn’t a hobby for me—it functions almost like a law of expression.
- When I can’t get a sentence out of my mouth, the keyboard steps in.
- Emotions I can’t explain find their place inside a paragraph.
Over the years, what I lived, read, and watched fused into a large archive in my head.
Many people call me a “walking library” because I read a lot—and because that feeling of in-betweenness forced me to see everything from multiple angles.
Most of the time, I was loved and accepted;
but there were also critical moments when I was pushed aside as if I were “the disabled one.”
That duality built the ground of my writing:
- Not fully at the center,
- Not fully outside…
This position in the middle kept pushing me to observe and take notes.
In my writing, I carry the feeling of people who live between the system and the margins—accepted, yet easily discarded when convenient.
Today, writing holds a clear place in my motivation system:
- To explain myself,
- To organize my memory,
- To turn the contradictions I live into a cool-headed text.
What a camera frame does to my view, writing does to my mind:
It sharpens the image, reduces the noise, and reveals what meaning remains underneath.
Sport: Motivation born from the will to rewrite cerebral palsy
Sport, for me, isn’t limited to “looking fit”;
it’s a protocol that retrains the brain–muscle line every day.
I couldn’t walk until I was around 4–5.
So my life started late, in terms of “movement.”
Every fall meant a new negotiation with the nervous system:
- When I fell, it wasn’t only pain,
- it was my brain receiving this message: “Next time, we’ll do it differently.”
Behind my running, swimming, calisthenics, and general conditioning work stands this line:
“Cerebral palsy can set rules for me, but I’ll design the shape of the game.”
Sport contributes to my motivation in three clear areas:
- A sense of control:
As control over my body increases, my mental strength rises too. - Energy management:
When I tie fatigue and spasms to a plan, building my day becomes easier. - Respect:
The respect I have for my body and effort spills into my creative work.
Every workout is a clear answer to the sentences built in my childhood—“he won’t walk, he’ll be bedridden.”
My biggest motivation: continuing to be Mert Karataş
From the outside, my sources of motivation might look like the Northern Lights, my music dreams, my sports goals, my travels.
In reality, my biggest motivation is being the person who can sustain all of it.
- Accepting cerebral palsy as a diagnosis, not carrying it as an identity,
- Keeping creation from becoming a romantic success story,
and holding it as a discipline embedded in daily life, - Turning my name into a production brand—not one remembered only as “a disabled story.”
The summary of my motivation is this:
“Life gave me a canvas.
I’m adding new layers onto it with photography, music, sport, and writing.”
Where this page sits on the homepage
This text can be read as a continuation of the “Who is Mert Karataş?” page on the homepage.
There I explain “who I am.”
Here, I open up the fuel behind that identity—my motivation system.
- For photography: curiosity that follows the Northern Lights,
- For music: the unexpected advantage of APD,
- For writing: the need to bring words in where speech falls short,
- For sport: the will to rewrite cerebral palsy,
- For life as a whole: the determination to remain “Mert Karataş.”
My motivation comes down to something simple:
When you open this site tomorrow, I want you to see a Mert who is still creating.