I have occasionally found myself in situations where I felt stuck as an artist. I felt my work was uninspired, that I’m wasn’t putting as much energy as I could into it, that I wasn’t making any significant progress and that I have to change something drastically about my art in order to do so. That situations were always accompanied with feelings of frustration and inadequacy to create anything truly valuable and of high quality.
I tired to find my way out of such situations by either forcing myself to create more or trying to think of a plan how to make art better both of which didn’t work and made me feel more frustrated and unhappy.

But, one time when I was obsessively trying to think about how to make myself and my art better it dawned on me: Actually everytime I made some real, genuine preogress in my work, it was comletely spontaunues. It was like something , a powerful force carried me on a wave of positive energy and inspiration and I wasn’t able to control the change , it just happened effortlessy when I was ready for it. I didn’t have to analyze anything or think t all , it just happend and it felt liberating, and exciting. Every single time.

So I realized that if real progress in my work always comes spontaneously and effortlessly, my feelings of being stuck as an artist have their roots somewhere else. And with time I noticed that my feelings of inadequancy as an artist usually come from one of these reasons and have nothing to do with my art whatsoever:

1. Sleep deprivation, fatigue, illness or generally being low on energy
When we’re tired, sleep deprived or ill we usually experience ourselves and our work in more negative way, instead of seeing all the progress and success we achieved we are more likely to focus on negativity, our flaws and all what we believe we have yet to achieve. It very easy to become oversensitive and overly critical of yourself when you are low on energy yet many people (including myself) seem to forget that simple fact and start feeling very bad about their work when in reality everything is perfectly fine and all we need is some rest.

2. Working too much
Have you ever worked so hard and so intensely that you just didn’t have time to take a break to distance yourself from your creations and become aware of all the wonderful things you’ve done? Yes, it can happen. Sometime we work, work, work and feel like we’re not making any results, we just don’t see any and become frustrated. It feels like all we do is work but not make any progress but, the truth is, sometimes all you need to do is to let some time pass so you become aware of all the great things you’ve done.

3. Having a problem in some other area of your life that you’re unaware of and projecting it onto your art
Many times it happened to me that I had a problem in some other area of my life, I felt unsatisfied with my social life, finances, family issues or my personal growth etc but I just wasn’t aware of it. I felt unhappy and restless but I couldn’t quite point my finger on what was wrong so I started projecting negative feelings on my art work (which is not surprising because our art is in a way a natural extension of our personality). But soon as I got aware of my real problem, I stopped torturing myself with trying to “make my art better” and fixed the actual problem.

4. Need to establish control over your life
Sometimes, when life gets too chaotic and messy we get a desire to establish some extent of control over it. And if many external factors we have no control over (like bad economy, bad weather, negative people, politics ) seem to over-flood our life we’ll try to control what we can and for artists that can be their creative work. We don’t want to feel helpless so if we can’t change anything else we try to change our art “for the better” instead of letting it develop naturally.

Becoming aware of all of this made me deal better with occasional feelings of being stuck and frustrated and it helped me to stop pressuring myself when there was no need for it and if you ever been in similar situation I hope reading this can help you too