Whatever I do/create I destroy it. Right now this is happening with my playlists. And it’s absurd, because no one listens to them anyway but I keep having days when I feel like I should delete all of them. Then it’s my private notebook. Then it’s what I write, what I paint, movies I kept track of on an app, and the list goes on.
To be totally honest it’s as if I’m afraid I might be insane for keeping these things. Some contain personal things (playlists, notebook) so alright I might want to keep them private, but the real issue is that I do that when I think “oh what will they think?”. I don’t know what to do, it might sound very stupid but this has really been bothering me since forever.
I’ve hated every piece of art I ever created, and everything I ever wrote, until at least a few weeks later.
I’ve learned to control the impulse to delete, until the thing is about a month old.
But I give myself permission to delete anything older than a month old, that I still don’t like.
I also try to only delete stuff by percentage. So if I’m pruning old art or articles, I’ll enforce only deleting the 20% I dislike the most.
This way I know that any piece of work I really hate, I’ll give myself permission to get rid of, eventually, if I still really hate it, later.
It sounds perfectly normal to me.
Hell is other people. You only exist because other people see you, which means that other people have a chance to judge you. You can never escape the risk of their judgment. Never.
Most people go through three stages:
- Discovering this.
- Fighting this.
- Accepting this.
This is not a problem to solve, but instead a reality to accept. Think about this for a while. One day, you might realize that:
- They, not you, are responsible for how they judge you.
- You can’t stop them from judging you, only they can. And even they probably can’t.
- Most people most of the time are too busy thinking about themselves to pay much attention to you.
It’ll happen when you’re ready.
I spent decades worried about what people thought of me, because I’d been bullied in my youth and had to be aware of people’s motives for self-protection. I kept this habit even after the threats had gone away. That’s the power of habits established in childhood.
You could try, when you have this impulse, looking at the impulse as nothing more than an impulse that will fade away, if you look right at it.
Peace.
Sounds like you need to learn to enjoy the process instead of the end result. Even when something is unfinished, it isn’t useless because you either enjoyed making it or it was simply practicing a skill.
This. I’m constantly tweaking things to make them more and more of what I desire. But also the comment about waiting and checking back after a period of time sounds pretty good.
Worst case: find someone you can talk to about it.
There is another way to think of things you create.
They show the progress of you, if you can’t look back and say I’d do that differently now then you haven’t grown as a <writer/engineer/programmer/builder/friend/father>, accept that you are a work in progress at are we all.
I don’t know that I can help, but I used to have a blue notebook that I wrote poetry in when I was an angst teen. It probably only had a half dozen that I was really proud of, but I wish I had them still. My mom found it once and then relost it, so maybe some day when my folks are gone I’ll find it again.
Why delete anything that doesn’t take up space?
So I’m not the only one!! thank you, I thought I was crazy
You get out of this loop by creating some stuff and then very deliberately sharing it with people.
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