fears
I am a full-time art school student, I want to be a professional artist within a few years, and I am still afraid of drawing.
I can't help but wonder if there is just something fundamentally wrong with me.
To be fair, art is not like other learning endeavors--there is no immediate reward or improvement, no confirmation that you did the right studying or that your efforts paid off. Anything you do to try to improve likely won't show up as actual results until months afterward.
Even that would be OK if I knew I would still make the improvements I needed to in the long run, but I don't know that I will. I've been struggling to become a good artist for so long that every day I am plagued with doubts and fears that I don't have "it," whatever that may be, that I am going to improve to a higher level of mediocrity but never break past an essential skill barrier needed to get good/pro, that even if I study endlessly it will ultimately be meaningless.
There are a lot of times when I know I should be studying, but I don't. Because I'm paralyzed with fear that I will be wasting my time, I set myself up for failure from the start. There is a loud voice inside of me that says it is better to phone it in and not give 100% and fail because the alternative is giving everything I have all of the time and still coming up short, and the thought of that is unbearable.
One result is failure where I can speculate that I might've been successful if things had gone differently, which at least gives me a spark of hope. The other alternative is failure after doing everything I can and realizing that I just don't have the capacity to get good, and that would destroy my last dream in life.
I need to study everything that I can as much of the time as I can, but I am so scared of failing that I just let myself fail from the start to escape the disappointment of trying and never succeeding.
I don't know how to overcome this.
I can't help but wonder if there is just something fundamentally wrong with me.
To be fair, art is not like other learning endeavors--there is no immediate reward or improvement, no confirmation that you did the right studying or that your efforts paid off. Anything you do to try to improve likely won't show up as actual results until months afterward.
Even that would be OK if I knew I would still make the improvements I needed to in the long run, but I don't know that I will. I've been struggling to become a good artist for so long that every day I am plagued with doubts and fears that I don't have "it," whatever that may be, that I am going to improve to a higher level of mediocrity but never break past an essential skill barrier needed to get good/pro, that even if I study endlessly it will ultimately be meaningless.
There are a lot of times when I know I should be studying, but I don't. Because I'm paralyzed with fear that I will be wasting my time, I set myself up for failure from the start. There is a loud voice inside of me that says it is better to phone it in and not give 100% and fail because the alternative is giving everything I have all of the time and still coming up short, and the thought of that is unbearable.
One result is failure where I can speculate that I might've been successful if things had gone differently, which at least gives me a spark of hope. The other alternative is failure after doing everything I can and realizing that I just don't have the capacity to get good, and that would destroy my last dream in life.
I need to study everything that I can as much of the time as I can, but I am so scared of failing that I just let myself fail from the start to escape the disappointment of trying and never succeeding.
I don't know how to overcome this.