“Your art isn’t valued by the number of notes you get” okay but. If you spent 6 hours baking a cake for a party, but no one at the party eats your cake, it’s still disappointing.
This articulates something about the different between value and validation that I didn’t previously register on a conscious level.
This is why I tell people I feel more like an entertainer than an artist.
I want to hear them laugh, chat, comment, speak, roar, cry, get irrationally angry, I need people to respond to my art and get inspired and need more.
I don’t want a note, I want a response.
Responses are very nice. I like reading over them. They make me feel fuzzy. Of course, likes and reblogs are also very appreciated, but responses make me feel a special kinda fuzzy.
That’s the thing about the “oh, create for yourself, don’t worry about other people!” attitude (that almost exclusively comes from non-artists and people who have tons of followers and routinely get tons of validation for SOME reason) that doesn’t quite work. I guarantee you, most of us already ARE creating for ourselves above all-
But we POST our creations for human connection, and that’s not a bad thing.
I’m not sure when we all got to the point where wanting validation for something you worked hard at is seen as a bad thing. That you’re pathetic for wanting.
If you think that way it’s not only toxic as hell it’s killing creators.
Creating isn’t easy. When there’s nobody to look at your work and say, “You did a good job. This was hard.” The drive and ambition disappears, then so does the work.
Give your content creators value.
Reblog content.