Schrödinger’s content
a human look at disappointment
i’ve been living in a sort of Schrödinger’s content state my the ideas exist both as potential and as failure.
i’ve had so many creative projects sitting in my head. like video scripts, shot lists, tiktok drafts even imagined captions
i would rehearse it all internally.
-how i’d frame the shots
-the tone of the voiceover
-how the edit would look
sometimes i’d even daydream about the kind of reaction it would get.
or the one comment that would validate the whole piece
maybe even a dm from someone saying
this is exactly how i feel
then PTO happened and I got time to make something for myself.
so I made something and was confronted with the reality
it was harsh, yeah but not world-ending.
without the imagined validation propping up the project in my head
questions i asked
-do i still want to make this?
-do i care enough to post it even if it flops?
-can i let go of the version of this that only existed to be liked?
you don’t really experience an idea until you let it move all the way through you from ideation to creation to feedback
and i was creatively fucking constipated…not because i lacked inspiration but because i was afraid of what might happen after
i wanted to control the reaction before even posting, blocked myself from finishing anything
because if i didn’t post it…i couldn’t be ignored
my default response wasn’t even proper reflection. It was resentment.
“they don’t get it”
”the platform is broken”
etc etc
now i see that reaction for what it really is, not truth…just ego
but also, a very human attempt to protect myself from disappointment
maybe they don’t care
and maybe that’s not a problem, it’s a mirror
a gentle and sometimes brutal reminder to look at what i’m actually making.
why do you “go online”? what are you seeking?
once you answer that, you’re free.
not from criticism or the algorithm but from the mental purgatory of “almost”.
> -do i still want to make this?
>
>-do i care enough to post it even if it flops?
I think this is the key. I've been thinking about this as, "creating for myself doesn't mean creating for an audience of size zero. It means creating for an audience of size 1"
I think it's really hard to separate internal feedback from external feedback. Like, in both directions. Like, "just make what you want to make" isn't enough because some of the things i WANT i only do so because i am modeling what others think, and I want to make what will impress them. Pretending that I don't care what others think just makes it harder to detect when that is still driving my decision to create.
I do think a lot about how silo'd creators are these days compared to when I first started out, making flash games on Newgrounds. There were lots of solo artists but most projects were collaborations. And then even if it flopped, it'd still have been something that you & one other human thought was absolutely beautiful, or worth making.