Self-Doubt and Creativity: He Wouldn’t Believe It
I’ve said it before. I’ll probably say it again, the way you keep returning to a scar just to confirm it still belongs to you.
But God, I wish I could go back.
Not to fix anything. I want to materialize out of nowhere, slide into the booth across from my younger self, who is probably nursing chips and salsa in a Mexican restaurant scribbling in his journal, convinced the world had already decided its opinion of him — and just show him.
Not tell him. Telling never worked on me. Show him.
Spread it all out on the table. The photographs. The art. The projects that haven’t even happened yet, built in collaboration with people he hasn’t met, in rooms he hasn’t stood in, for reasons he couldn’t have invented on his best day. Let him turn it over in his hands. Let him squint at it under the lights.
He wouldn’t believe it. That’s the whole point. He’d look at me like I was running a con, because that’s what his life had taught him to expect, the bait, then the switch. He’d be waiting for the catch.
There is no catch, kid. That’s the most disorienting part.
The work is real. It’s strange and it’s real and it came from somewhere inside you that you keep trying to board up like a condemned building. Stop that. Quit apologizing for the weird corners. The weird corners are load-bearing.
Someday, someone’s going to hand you a project and trust you to do something extraordinary with it, and you’re going to be so alarmed by that trust that you almost fumble it… but you won’t. You’ll find the thing that lives underneath the obvious answer, the image that says what words keep failing to say, and you’ll make it real.
Back then, I was sure that I was devoid of artistic talent. That creative projects were for other people, and that any effort I made at art would be pointless.
He wouldn’t believe it. But I’d make him look anyway.
