“I've been a painter since I was 12. It has always been the place where I felt most like myself — the only space where my thoughts quieted down. For the past 6 months, I haven't touched a canvas once.

I don't know exactly when or why it stopped. Part of me thinks it's because I started sharing my work online two years ago, and slowly I began making work I thought people would respond to rather than work that felt true to me. The validation became the point, and then when the validation fluctuated, I stopped feeling safe creating at all.

Now I sit in front of a blank canvas and feel a kind of dread I've never felt before. It doesn't feel like laziness. It feels like grief.

Has anyone broken through this kind of block? Not the kind where you're uninspired — but the kind where the act of creating feels like it has too much riding on it?”