About self-doubt, shame, and anxiety as an artist

Lucyan J. C.
Sep 8, 2018 · 6 min read

It is no secret that becoming a skilled artist requires a lot of work, effort, and discipline, but it is rarely mentioned how much the road to improvement is filled with terrible days, stress, and self-doubt. I don’t mean to scare people away from it though, it is indeed a beautiful path but it doesn’t come without its hurdles.

I’ve been honing my skills for a little over 2 years now and in that period what I’ve noticed the most are the internal things nobody had warned me about: what goes through your head every day while you are drawing? what does seeing somebody else’s art mean to you? what do you feel when your work receives no attention or response after pouring so much love and effort into it? why can’t I stop hearing this jumble of words doubting me every time I pick up my stylus to start a new piece? how do you not just give up?

I don’t claim to have a solution to these occurrences (I actually don’t think there is a way to avoid them 100%), but maybe knowing what the answers to those questions are for me might help you feel better whenever you encounter them; it is a terrible thing to feel wrong and broken and not talking about it lest you are ridiculed for it.

“You only come when I’m down” — 2018

Regarding self-doubt

You might be going through your twitter feed one day and you stumble upon what you consider to be an amazing image, everything about it blows you away and for a moment you feel super inspired. After that you start thinking “who made this?” so you go to their profile and read their bio “So and so, artist from wherever… x-years younger than you, ten times your follower count, successful on Patreon”. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been through this, followed by me hating everything I’ve ever made, not being able to make one stroke without feeling insecure and immediately deleting it, or starting new drawings without going anywhere with any of them. It is then made worse when I start seeing my own work through the art of this other person and begin to wonder “what would they do here?” since I am not to be trusted with the creative decisions during my creative endeavors.

Imagine you go through your day and little by little you start seeing the world less in first person and more in third. As if it were a movie or a game, the camera is pulled from your eyes to the back of your head and then hovers a few feet behind you, following this person you know is yourself but something about them is off and so you don’t really recognize them. This is what it feels like to me whenever I start doubting myself: my creative identity is replaced by this foreign element, and as an incompatible organ is rejected after a transplant, the body shuts down, I can’t create anymore.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, look away from art for a bit and see how the world keeps on going, how before and after seeing that image nothing really changed except for your perception. I can’t tell you you are doing enough, because I don’t know you, but whatever it is that is good about your art is the thing that comes from within your creative self. Whether you appreciate that creative identity or its presentation is something you should always work on, but never give it up or you’ll dry up and wither away. Trust me when I tell you losing yourself is way worse than finding yourself lacking in skill, the latter can be overcome with work and accepting your flaws, the former is just pain.


Maybe your self-doubt doesn’t come from the excelling of others but from your failure despite your hard work. It can be disheartening to work on a piece for days, maybe weeks, then post it to your various social media accounts only for it to receive no attention at all, or even to be straight up rejected.

Well, first off, nobody owes us artists anything. So if you come from a place of entitlement, get off your high horse walk with everyone else, you’ll maybe realize that you do the same to others. How many times have you ignored a video or an image someone you follow posted?

Now, maybe this pain comes from a place of genuine disappointment. Maybe you expected the piece to do well, to have people sharing it and replying to it, but you got silence. I’ve dealt with this pretty much every time I’ve made something, my stuff simply doesn’t seem to reach a wide audience or at least not as wide as I expected. This doesn’t mean my work is worthless, even if it feels like that, because the worth of my work doesn’t (or shouldn’t ) come from others. I know whether or not I could have done a better job or if I was just phoning it in, the audience is the audience: they do not write the script.

While being unseen might be a problem if you want to move into being an independent artist, it also presents an opportunity to try out new things and to research into how to change that situation. Just know that no amount of retweets or likes is a grade on the artistic quality of a piece, it literally means nothing, it’s just an ego thing, let it go.

The other route toward self-doubt is being too harsh with yourself. It is sometimes impossible to stop bashing your work and by extension yourself. The only way to deal with this is by doing your best and moving forward. You can’t do anything but improve and accept that you are still learning.

Regarding anxiety

I think over the years we see more and more people opening up about anxiety, not only as a clinically diagnosed chronic condition, but also as something people may experience from time to time due to things spiraling out of control.

I’ve experienced it whenever things start tearing apart, when posts don’t do well at all, when I can’t seem to find in my art what I find in other’s, when I can’t reach potential clients, when I start feeling I’m going nowhere. I don’t know how to deal with it yet, but I seem to do so better whenever I’ve put something solid along the path in front of me. If I know I’m working toward a goal, the possibility of my efforts flopping scares me a little less because if I’ve done everything I can to get there, then I will have probably have done a lot of work that can serve some other goal.

The other way to deal with it for me is to have other pillars in my life, so when art is not a stable place to be, I can rely on my family, friends, or girlfriend, to see that the world is not falling apart, I just can’t draw armor right.

Closing thoughts

The path to becoming an independent skillful artist has been (and I bet will be) fairly unforgiving toward my sense of self-confidence and self-worth, but in a twisted way I’m somewhat glad it has. It is a price to pay for caring, for trying to follow the unsure and risk everything for a passion that may never pay off, it is not a desirable goal but it might be an unavoidable hurdle, one very harsh and exhausting. It is important to keep these negative inputs at bay and to not allow them to persist through time, but also to not ignore them, for they teach us about ourselves whenever we analyze them.

I’ve learned a whole deal about my motives and agendas, some of which I didn’t even realized I had. The most important thing I’ve learned though is this: remove every possible excuse you might have to justify hurting yourself emotionally. Set yourself up for success, be clear and honest with yourself and expect bad things to come so you are ready when they do.

That’s it.

Lucyan J. C.

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COMMISSIONS OPEN. AVI by the awesome @jassaca_swag. I paint monsters and stuff. Business: cyangorillaart@gmail.com OR DM

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