006 - fear of creating, creating for fear

22 Apr, 2025

recently it feels like i've become so much more aware of the fear that goes into the art i make, and more relevantly, the fear that goes into the art i don't make. this fear is a multi-faceted beast, as all fear is, but the serpent's head i want to talk about today is simply my fear of rejection.

it comes to me in so many forms - the fear of making something bad, the desire to make something good, a set of invisible standards i believe i must hold myself to - but i think that for all of these cases, the fear is what underpins them. the rejection doesn't even have to involve other people - i think that often my fear comes from the thought that i will dislike my own art, and dislike myself for making it.

it's poison. in it's simplest form, it just stops me dead at the gate, paralysed at the outcomes i can picture before me. but i think that past that, there's the second, more insidious form, the kind that leads me to soften the sentences i write, to fix some of the stranger wording i'm drawn to, to over-explain all my bits, just in case someone doesn't understand them and is turned off. i can feel myself softening the things i create any time i can imagine a guy who hates what i've done, and god, am i good at imagining guys that hate me.

there's a particular thought someone said in a conversation i had quite a long time ago that i think about a lot. in order to make art that is about something¹, you have to be into that thing to an almost insane degree, to far more than anyone would think from seeing the final outcome. all communication is imperfect. to communicate something as strongly as you want, you have to start from a place that's even stronger. i can't keep letting myself temper my art for an imagined audience that probably hates my guts anyway. i can't keep being scared over ghosts nobody but me can see. i don't like the thought of making bad art, but i think that it's infinitely better than making art that is boring.

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