Christian Estrup Updated on Oct 22, 2020 1 min read

A long finger to self-doubt

It is not every day that it is easy to keep faith in what you create; paint, write, whatever, has any value. But damn it. Even though it's hard, never let self-doubt get the better of you and undermine the project.

"I regularly lose complete confidence in what I'm doing," Thom Yorke says to Alec Baldwin. Not that you don't know that it is so, but it is still infinitely liberating to hear it from one of the masters themselves.

Creating art is—as the saying goes—putting something into the world that is not already there, but arises during the process.

Elevating and working on one's own small lousy idea in the firm belief that it contains something significant and greater—also for others than oneself—can be as difficult and exhausting as it sounds stupid. It takes real stubbornness to opt out all possible other temptations, and insist and insist and insist on following one's own hunch and have it manifest in a finished, physical form.

You have to at least believe in the project yourself; have to give his self-doubt a long finger and send it to where it belongs and the pepper grows.

No wonder you sometimes stop and think that this?!—this is the stupidest, most talentless, idiotically miserable waste of time the world has yet seen. Self-doubt is as natural as it is cursed, and undermining.

Nor strange, if as an aspiring artist you take on the character of a completely unbearable, egotistical megalomaniac. You damn well have to insist that the process is vital and that what you spend most of your waking hours trying to make look like a finished work is also so good, so magnificent, and so fantastically thought out that in In the end, it's worth the effort.

You have to at least believe in the project yourself; have to give his self-doubt a long finger and send it to where it belongs and the pepper grows.

It is far from always enjoyable, but the damned truth is that when the calling is there, you have to try and give it your best. Even the days you manage to convince yourself that what you mess with is the worst junk; even those days it is necessary to grit your teeth and push through.

Even when you completely lose faith that what you create has value, you still create something. And the alternative to creating something, as you know is not creating anything at all. Nothing, as in a big, round, resounding zero that is.

And suddenly the choice is not so difficult.