The Battle for Self Belief
If you’re a creative person, perhaps someone who makes a living from their imagination, then there’s a good chance that you were first inspired to pick up a pen, a camera, or a paintbrush by looking at the some of the best work in your chosen medium. You encountered the greats, you were moved by their masterpieces, and you decided to have a go yourself. It’s how most of us get started. But there’s an awkward problem with this path to creative expression: against the best work in your genre your own efforts can come up a little short. Before long you may find yourself beside a pile of screwed up paper or a ripped up canvas, your head in your hands, cursing the day you ever had the gall to believe you could actually do this.
Alongside having the tools and the space and the inspiration to make work, it’s commonly held that we need another essential ingredient: self-belief. Without faith in ourselves how on earth are we to navigate the terrible travails entailed in bringing an idea into being?
It’s easy when you look enviously across at the output of other creatives – the solo shows in high end galleries, the bestselling novels, the critically acclaimed albums, the black pencil winning campaigns – to assume that they are the products of minds unburdened by self-doubt. When the work is that good, surely the people behind it must have an unblinking faith in their own genius?
Well, the chances are they don’t. Despite their veneer of seemingly bulletproof invulnerability, almost certainly these high flyers have to fight a daily battle against a sense of their own inadequacy too. To be able to make great work requires an acute appreciation of a given medium, and once you have that level of understanding it is impossible not to see where your own work falls short. As the novelist Anne Enright once said, ‘Only bad writers think that their work is really good.’
John Steinbeck, who is blisteringly honest about his own crises of confidence in his journals.
When John Steinbeck was writing one of the great novels of the twentieth century, the Pulitzer winning Grapes of Wrath, he confided in his journal, ‘I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people … I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability.’ The vault of the Sistine Chapel is considered to be one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time. Yet halfway through its creation, in a poem to his friend Giovanni Da Pistoia, Michelangelo confessed, ‘My painting is dead … I am not in the right place. I am not a painter.’ More recently, the award winning writer and musician Kae Tempest revealed their belief that ‘there is no success in writing. There are only better degrees of failure. To write is to fail. An idea is a perfect thing … there is no way a writer cannot injure that idea as they wrestle with it.’
There are really only two kinds of creatives, those who admit to suffering an occasional crisis of self-belief and those who lie and claim not to, but no one is truly immune. The monkey of self-doubt is one we all carry on our backs. To believe that you can only make work when your reserves of confidence are fully topped up is a fallacy; procrastination by another name.
It’s only once you accept that the work you make is probably going to end up being a disappointment that you can actually get on with making it. The musician Jeff Tweedy recently published a great book on the creative process, How to Write One Song, and in it he explains how ‘You have to sound bad to sound good, even if you’ve written 500 songs … writing a song will teach you that it’s OK to fail.’ I recently interviewed the artists John Wood and Paul Harrison and they described how, over their thirty year working relationship, they’ve come to realise that ‘You will have really terrible ideas on a daily basis, every artist does.’ Embracing your weaknesses is maybe the most important step you can take in overcoming them.
The artists John Wood & Paul Harrison
Counterintuitive though it may seem, an acute episode of self-doubt can often presage a creative breakthrough. It’s like that old line about the darkest hour being just before the dawn. In Patti Smith’s brilliant memoir Just Kids, she describes her own artistic nadir – a time when everything she made ‘seemed irrelevant’ and she was on the verge of giving up. Shortly afterwards, and against the odds, everything suddenly fell into place and her music career began.
Another valuable truth to hold close to your heart when you’re slogging away alone on the creative battlefield and self-belief has all but disappeared, is that even though there may be better writers or artists or designers out there, there is, though it may seem glib to say it, no one better at being you. In the wise words of Dr Seuss, ‘Today You are You, that is truer than true, there is no one alive who is Youer than You.’ Sure, you may not have the skills of more established or acclaimed creatives, but you have a perspective which is ineluctably your own and the truer you can be to your unique vision of the world, without mimicking someone else’s, the more chance you have of one day entering the pantheon of the greats yourself.
Even if you’re lucky enough to have found yourself buoyed along by one of those rare gusts of creative flow, where self-consciousness has disappeared and you’ve been able to work without the affliction of wondering if your work is any good, you may still find self-doubt comes knocking later on.
Maybe it arrives in that moment when you proudly show your writing or drawing to a partner or friend and despite the compliments on their lips you can see the uncomfortable truth in their eyes – and before you know it, you’ve begun spiralling down into the vortex of doubt. Or it comes when you enter your work for an award, feeling confident that this time it’s gold, and you fail even to get a nomination. No matter the circumstances, it’s important to accept that self-belief is fragile and it will be fractured again and again throughout your creative career. Sometimes it will even seem broken beyond repair. But so long as you keep on keeping on throughout the darkest storms of doubt then your self-belief can never truly be vanquished, and with each lame-assed word or brushstroke that tiny resilient spark that keeps you doing what you do will grow a little stronger.
For anyone lost in the wilderness of doubt right now I’d encourage you to pick up a copy of Musa Okwonga’s recent memoir In the End It Was All About Love. There can be few more honest and open accounts of creative self-questioning. When Musa’s self-belief has almost entirely crumbled he writes a note to himself, one I’ve made the effort to recall in similar circumstances: ‘Imagine what you would do if you were confident, and then do it.’
This article first appeared in Creative Review magazine.