Lately, I thought that working on some more neutral content (namely, character sheets for my little posse of OCs) would help ease me into regaining some confidence in my own work, but the insecurity has only persisted. I hate being in this state, cause it gets me into a mental catch 22.

One of the best solutions to breaking out of an art block is making things. Unfortunately, when I'm feeling exceedingly insecure, what I make isn't good for this. The selective bias boils down to, "what I've achieved was trivial, what I've yet to attempt is insurmountable." Worse still, seeing others' fantastic work broadly has an effect counter to inspiration. "It's been done now, likely better than you'll manage it if you tried."

It only further discourages me from focusing on my strengths since I'm too busy regretting the ideas I didn't have. Don't even get me started on the troublesome ideas surrounding the use of reference material and maintaining originality within this community.

I've been trying hard to train myself out of worrying about that and just focus on making good art, derivative or not. It's not easy. This is very much a "me" problem, but when I'm in my vulnerable state, any new idea I see is simply territory that's no longer accessible to me. Basically, someone's "claimed" it. Anything related will be derivative. Copying is verboten, but where is the line?

It's ridiculous.

I can't wait until I've found my groove within a little niche of my own style of personal content, even though I still hope to tackle a fairly diverse spread of themes. Right now, though, I still feel paralyzed cause of so many different factors and choices available to me.

I have some direction now, at least. That's better than I was when I launched my site and migrated from Patreon, but there's still a long road ahead of me to feel like I'm really creating what I consider "my own" content again. I'll be dealing with growing pains until then.

Thanks for reading through this. I'm okay, I just have some self-destructive ideas about what constitutes acceptable work, which I have yet to reconcile. I know they aren't true, but they still hold a lot of sway in how I do my thing.

I think the one thing that hurts the most is that by now, it ought to be as easy for me as "just drawing," but it isn't yet.

I'll get there, though.