You read the articles. You attend the workshops. You hustle to become a powerhouse of marketing and promotion. You build the website, tweet, post, network, show up. You’re playing to win.

So was I. But somewhere along that winding path of self-promotion and goal-chasing, I missed something critical: I never sold myself to myself.

I don’t mean belief. I believed in making art. I believed in my work as a viable career path. That wasn’t the problem. What I lacked was acceptance. At a certain point, I had to make a choice: keep inventing a more “marketable” version of myself—or step into the truth of who I already was.

I didn’t know myself. And more importantly, I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I was crafting a fiction, not living a non-fiction.

There are no two people alike—and no two artists alike. But the pressure to conform to some archetype of “the artist” runs deep. We’re trained to invent ourselves rather than discover ourselves. The turning point for me was when I stopped trying to become and started paying attention to who I already was.

Once I did that, things shifted. My work changed. It became something only I could make. Writing promotional copy stopped feeling like a chore because it was grounded in something true. I made faster, clearer decisions. I stopped chasing the struggle as some kind of rite of passage. I got out of my own way.

Life got easier. More reality-based. More connected. I found myself making better art and better choices. I started reaching out for opportunities with real enthusiasm—not performance.

Here’s the part no one tells you: the most important thing you can do as an artist is not to create. It’s to observe. Accept. Meet yourself. When you know who you are, the art becomes inevitable—and sustainable.