Many people are dissatisfied when they feel unseen. When they were young, it seemed like nobody wanted to listen; that their dreams fulfilled is the only way to vindicate their past traumas. It has to be larger than what anyone could have ever expected. Therefore, who’s viewing the work and rewards at the end becomes more important than they would be without the trauma.
When writers want to communicate something profound, they often think that the audience is the most important consideration. We want to be understood, so we look to other people who are in our “target audience” for approval or disapproval of our work. By doing this, we are putting human valuation above what is much bigger than ourselves. What is popular with an audience today is hated by it a hundred years from now, or a decade from now.
The people who love your work today could be your biggest haters later. If you switch up style or change interests, they take that as a personal offence. That you’re no longer going to fill their cups with the dopamine your art and creations provided. Therefore, it is much healthier to give up on approval before you write another word than to write to get more of it. Give it to something that is beyond what any person could ever define or judge, because in that space, there is unlimited potential and acceptance. Many valuable authors and thinkers have been disregarded until after they’re dead. It won’t be perfect enough or authentic enough to please everybody, so being satisfied pleasing a few can be a blessing, so treating praise and hatred as the same coin you choose to flip, or give away for free, so it won’t be flipped again.
When it is gone, you don’t have the burden of trying to make your identity based on the shifty and fickle changes of society. The mountaintop is a much worse place to live than the cave inside the mountain. You are protected from the elements, not seen unless you want to be, and can get light as needed and darkness too. Those are the times when everything you could be is tested and strengthened for the day you see the light again. You need no coins for trade when you have a garden of your own. No marketplace for the farm that can grow its own sustenance, and when you share your produce, it will be because others need it, and the rest will be savored without the market input.
As creators, we participate in a constant influx and change of what is valued. It’s important to be careful in how we derive our worth, and that the work is not what fills our cup, only. It’s our spiritual connection to something that strengthens us, and that cannot be blown away with the wind when times get tough in the oftentimes cruel world we live in.