Insecure.

Over the years I've been alive, the insecurities I've carried around have happily dwindled down. Time, therapy, and realizing how often someone's reaction isn't about me have eroded away those mountainous voices in my head, leaving a quiet lake with some gorgeous rocks in their place.

But one place it's stayed - is in my art. Imposter syndrome is real in my artistic life. It's real despite having published work across disciplines that's been praised. It's real despite putting in the work in my studio for years - on my writing, on photography, on projects built from code.

For a long time, I thought it was just the gap. As Ira Glass so perfectly describes, there's a gap between the taste that gets us into a form of art - and our ability to create work that is up to that taste. It's a real thing, and takes years of work to bridge.

But that's not the whole story - at least for me. See, despite feeling confident in my ability to create the written piece I want, despite finally finding my voice, there's still a nagging voice in the back of my head, from time to time. "Is this something that's worth people's time? Honestly?"

One of the best lessons of my life has been about this very question. See, years ago, I was a volunteer at a small non-profit that ran free writing workshops for folks in needs. I was lucky to lead workshops in prisons and jails, community centers, and last-chance schools for kids in and out of trouble. It was the honor of a lifetime, and still one of the things I'm proudest to have done - those workshops made a big impact in some folks' lives.

But the hardest part was the ask. See, in most workshops, near the end of the ten-week session, we facilitators were supposed to ask participants if they wanted to donate. When sitting around a table of folks who were often in tough financial straits, it felt deeply uncomfortable to do, rude, not understanding of these folks' needs.

But one day, I had a conversation with the head of the organization about this very feeling. And she turned my perspective on its head. One of the founding pillars of the organization was "Respect." But what I was doing? Feeling weird about asking someone if they wanted to contribute? That was disrespectful.

I was deciding for someone else how they should to spend the money they had. Sure, they might only have had five bucks that day - but maybe it was really meaningful for them to contribute a few of those dollars to help keep the program going that had made a difference in their life. Autonomy and agency matter, and it was their money to decide about. Same goes for time. Same goes for decisions about what to do with our lives.

So if someone wants to spend some of their life engaging with what I've made, that's their choice to make, not mine.

I wish I could tell you that it quiets the insecurity, all the time. The calm rationality and kindness of granting whoever wants to engage with my work the autonomy to do just that. But trauma casts a long shadow, and some days, it doesn't.

And I know it's an issue that's plagued artists as long as there has been art. Countless before me have written about it - and better - and come to the same conclusion: the job of an artist is to put work out there. To send it off into the world, a tiny boat amongst the big waves. The rest is not our business.

And here, even at the end of this, I'm still not sure why I share things like this. Except that pretty much every time, I hear from someone who says, "I needed to hear this today". So if that's you - cheers. We're all in this thing together, trying to figure it out.

And we've got this.

With lots of love, -Steven

p.s. The best thing I saw this week sent me and its creator down a rabbit hole (and might send you down one too, to be fair.) It's about a musician who tried to switch from Spotify back to an old-school iPod for a month - and the surprising number of things that changed on that journey.