if your art is good enough for you, it is good enough

by bea mendoza

This blog post has been impossible to write. I have been sitting here, sifting through drafts, for far too long, agonizing over what is the right thing to say, struggling to come up with something that you would find interesting.

But that's the problem with creating, isn't it? Once you envision an audience, you worry too much about what they want to see, and lose sight of anything you need. In order to be our best creative selves, we must let go of expectation. We have to let go of what we expect of ourselves and of others, and all of the in between and overlap. 

My first year of college, I became an Instagram poet. Now, I'm no Atticus or Rupi Kaur (I never really got a handle on true short form, aesthetically pleasing #Instapoetry), but I did eventually amass a small following. This was surprising, because my poetry was being seen—and liked— by complete strangers. While this was supposedly everything I wanted (I am, after all, an attention-starved, social media crazed Gen Z'er), hitting even fifty followers terrified me. As the numbers rose, the gravity of what I was doing sank in. I was sharing my writing with people! People were reading things I wrote about my life! And they had opinions on it!

This is everything an artist could want: an audience! Is this not why we create things, to be seen? To get the satisfaction of someone pulling a line from a poem you spent weeks on and adding several heart Emojis by it as they comment on your piece? To have users in your DMs asking when you'll post again? To be told that you are, in fact, a good artist?

The minor attention has paralyzed me, and I never know what to post on my account. Nothing feels good enough for my grid or for the potential eyes that may stumble upon my crudely designed graphics; nothing is good enough for this audience that I don't know.

But why am I judging myself for them? Why am I invalidating my work before anyone else has seen it? To get out of this posting paralysis (this performance anxiety) there must be an attitude adjustment, a paradigm shift, a change of heart: I need to get back to creating for creation's sake. I need to stop judging a piece before it is fully realized. I can't reject myself for other people! This is a lesson that I learn over and over again, and I worry will never stick. 

I am writing this to tell both myself and you, lovely reader, to silence that part of you that looks at your short film, your still-life, your blog post for your university's literary and arts publication and tells you that it isn't good enough for other people. That doesn't matter. Other people shouldn't matter in the creative process. What matters most is what you want to create. Everyone else comes after. I have found that my best work has been that which I thought would be too weird for anyone else, so going into the process I said I'd never let other people read or see it. I would always look at my work after those sessions of free expression in complete awe of the experience of creating, because the words would flow so easily (or at least, easier than before), and feel right. I would enjoy the process again, because these pieces, I thought, would be just for me, though whenever I chose to show them to others, they would be well-received. Moreover, I'd be confident enough to share the pieces, because I knew what they meant to me, first and foremost, and was not hung up on what I wanted other people to get out of them, but instead curious as to what they would find for themselves.

To be a creative person is a beautiful thing. There is so much magic in creating something from nothing. Don't let what other people may say stop you from making art that is meaningful to you. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to post on Instagram.