Sometimes you just need to hear a series of words that perfectly defines or counter-minds the everything going on in your head. If you're lucky it comes from a friend or a colleague that you respect and trust. Today, for me it came in the form of a YouTube video.
I take after my father in a lot of ways, without trying. We both have this ingrained work ethic and belief that if you can do something, you should do something. We also both have a strong feeling that if you try hard enough things will work out for yourself. In today's competitive work force and even more so in the creative art realms it can often seem like you putting everything into an idea but people only see the end result. They do not see the hours of struggling it took to make an idea slowly come together and become a final product. The hours of fear that things aren't going to come together like you had hoped, that what you've achieved isn't good enough, that you want to do better but despite throwing the entirety of your heart and mind at the wall as hard as you can, some parts just don't seem to stick to it like you expected. On top of that add the mindless ghouls that seem to climb the ladder into positions that become the directors of your efforts, but are clearly shells of competency of both technique and concept, but managed to say the right thing to the right person at the right time, true or not.
I find myself in a position these days where if my inbox doesn't receive 100+ emails containing requests for tweaks then it must be a weekend. A lot of these eMails feel cold, like they don't understand my creative ideas and are trying to fit the finessed, passion filled concepts into unworthy ideas (read: square peg, round hole). After enough of these signals, and added stress of things seemingly not going the way I thought that they would, even I begin to crack. I just want to cry out into the streets about how nothing seems to be going right.
I feel inadequate.
I feel like I've already failed but still have months to go.
I want to quit.
It's times like these that all you want is 1 thing to go right. For people to take a step back and see the bigger picture and have a moment of their own. For someone to tell you it's good enough, that you're good enough. Maybe even tell you it surprised them and made them excited. That they loved it. And sometimes a YouTube video talking about how happiness is reality being better than expectations, and saying you're good enough how you are so long as you believe it, is exactly what you needed to here in that moment.