lesbianlinkle:

I really truly feel like we need to talk about this, especially as someone who has grown up as an artist online.

I’ve absorbed some unhealthy mindsets over the years and have since spent a long time unlearning them, this is definitely one of the most insidious ones.

It’s SO easy to get into a mindset that unless you get x number of notes on your work like all those other creators, what you make isn’t worth anything.

But the truly nasty part about this mindset is you never reach “x number”, because it always gets bigger!

100 notes, 500 notes, 1,000 notes, 10,000 notes… as soon as you get a single post that reaches one of your milestones - you want it to get bigger.

It’s not surprising i mean there’s entire video games where the only reward is the number getting bigger, there’s a sense of validation from seeing that number grow.

But the internet is fickle, you cannot predict what will be picked up and what won’t. This is important to remember, so much of it is based on chance and not on your personal skill.

Like, there’s a constant stream of new content being put up online every second. Having someone see your post at all is honestly amazing if you think about it.

Anyway, it’s so so easy and so unbelievably unhealthy to fall into a mindset of ‘nobody reblogs my work, I can’t create anything good’. But it’s just not true!

Your value as a creator is not determined by a number on your social media page.

It’s determined by you, and what you value in your work. For your own mental health, try not to focus on the numbers.

Focus on the people - your friends, that person who likes and reblogs everything you post, the people who wait excitedly for your next creation. They’re the ones who matter, not the number at the bottom.

It’s not easy, but the less you tie your self worth to a nebulous, unreachable number the better you’ll feel about your work.