one of my big goals for the new year is to just make stuff, even if it sucks. i've spent too much of my creative life thinking about an imagined audience that does not and has never existed for my work and it's been fucking paralyzing.
i talk about this with my friends who i play rpgs with a lot, that i've become so, like, "actual play poisoned" that i feel like if i'm not Brennan Lee Mulligan or Austin Walker that i'm failing as a GM and it's just like... we may be playing the same sport but we're in a totally different league! my friends and i are not recording this! why am i trying to hold myself to this standard of people who are getting paid to do this? why am i trying to make people who will never hear what happens in my game happy? why am i worrying about an imaginary audience instead of the one right here, in front of me?
And that's representative of a cloud that's been hanging over every creative thing i do. Writing, photography, graphic design, music. i have Battletech minis that have been sitting unpainted for almost a year because what if they don't look like the ones on instagram! how did i get the idea in my head that all this stuff is content instead of art? that the end goal is to post and get engagement and conversions instead of the end goal being the fun of doing it?
what a fucking way to live!