I have feels about this post and several others of yours, and I also can't write lately, fiction or otherwise, but I'd like to try really hard to write you a letter because just today I experienced something similar.
In my case - and this is hard to admit - I'm not the kind of person who Does The Thing (writing, painting, what have you) merely Out of Love, in a way it just gushes out of me, and it's just pleasurable to do and the hell to whether it's good or not, clichéd or not - what matters is the love and the enjoyment in Doing The Thing, it doesn't matter if it goes nowhere, yadda yadda yadda. Intrinsic Motivation, also known as Flow state. Nope.
No. I'm afraid of my own mediocrity. Everything I do must be amazing (yes, including politically correct) or I get seriously depressed/self-loathing. My standards for "acceptable" keep getting higher and higher as I slowly improve, which makes them unreachable, and me constantly feeling like shit about what I do. I can't enjoy writing a sentence, in pure fun, stream-of-consciousness-creative-writing-just-let-it-flow mode, because I keep thinking "this would never in a million years get past an editor #abyssofshame".
So I have a hard time actually enjoying the things I enjoy most (which makes me a great consumer but a terrible creator, and a person wrought with envy and amotivation). Fun times. But LEARN FROM ME! YOU'RE BETTER THAN THIS, AMY. I KNOW YOU ARE.
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chiming
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Date: 2016-03-20 01:14 am (UTC)From:In my case - and this is hard to admit - I'm not the kind of person who Does The Thing (writing, painting, what have you) merely Out of Love, in a way it just gushes out of me, and it's just pleasurable to do and the hell to whether it's good or not, clichéd or not - what matters is the love and the enjoyment in Doing The Thing, it doesn't matter if it goes nowhere, yadda yadda yadda. Intrinsic Motivation, also known as Flow state. Nope.
No. I'm afraid of my own mediocrity. Everything I do must be amazing (yes, including politically correct) or I get seriously depressed/self-loathing. My standards for "acceptable" keep getting higher and higher as I slowly improve, which makes them unreachable, and me constantly feeling like shit about what I do. I can't enjoy writing a sentence, in pure fun, stream-of-consciousness-creative-writing-just-let-it-flow mode, because I keep thinking "this would never in a million years get past an editor #abyssofshame".
So I have a hard time actually enjoying the things I enjoy most (which makes me a great consumer but a terrible creator, and a person wrought with envy and amotivation). Fun times. But LEARN FROM ME! YOU'RE BETTER THAN THIS, AMY. I KNOW YOU ARE.