how does one rebuild a sense of creative imagination and discipline when it's been suppressed by self-loathing for most of your life?
when i was a kid, i was extremely imaginative and i drew and wrote stories and sang songs all the time. then at age 12, i got severely criticized online for some bad drawings i made, and it affected me so bad that i stopped making art altogether. now i'm 25 and i'm just starting to regain my ability to create things without shame, and my artist friends even say that my art is good, but i just can't help feeling the regret of all those years i lost.
these days i do a lot of figure drawings and still lifes and studies of artists i like, and i can see myself improving, but i feel completely useless to applying it. when i think of trying to draw my own characters, i can barely even imagine what i want them to look like, and all the shame just comes rushing back. it feels like there's this impenetrable wall around my imagination that i can't break through, and i can't remember what any of that joy and excitement and recklessness that i used to get from art felt like.
does anyone else here deal with this? how do you get through it? how do you find that kind of inspiration again and actualize it consistently without getting debilitated by the shame and doubt?
while i wouldn't say my advice is the best and i feel like it's probably more effective alongside the help of other methods rather than your only means of "becoming more creative" but
as someone with a similiar past i feel like what helped me rebuild myself creatively and get over the shame is probably starting small and expressing my creativity in more iterative and "safe" ways, like drawing fanart of characters i like as something else, or a really stupid scenario that makes sense to them, or doing doodles of weird looking creatures just because i can, i feel like a big part that handicaps people with this issue like us is the feeling that creativity is something that's inherently "big" and "unique" and noticeable but when you're still bankrupt you can't start making projects that you can't reasonably dedicate your mind to brainstorming yet as much i think, it's a muscle you need to train from my experience
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