Question: How do I get over the anxiety of sharing my work with other people?

I definitely don’t think anyone likes writing. No one likes writing. At least, I don’t think any great writer likes writing. It’s the worst. To live in anxiety, it’s the worst. I do a lot of therapy. I have always done therapy a lot, but it really helped me moving out here. I’m just a huge fan of therapy.

If you’ve been given the opportunity to make something, it probably means that you deserve it on some level. If you got yourself there, it’s because someone saw something in you that either showed potential or a skill or ability.

It is also beneficial as a form of practice for writing in general. Paying attention to how people respond to a tweet feels like a kind of workshop that helps me get a better idea of what people are into. Not that I’m necessarily trying to create work to pander to other people, but I think a big part of my process is about overcoming this social anxiety/inability to connect and communicate with other people in a normal way. So when I’m thinking about it like that, I’m considering how people are responding to my words. I’m seeing it as a way of me being able to communicate with people, maybe in a way that isn’t normally possible for me.

A lot of the time, my most talented students feel a lot of anxiety about their first release. I’m always saying to them what was said to me when I was starting out: Nobody is waiting for your first release. Nobody is expecting it to be good.

I’m easily freaked out. I’m super anxious. I’ve always been that way. I’m a very fearful and anxiety-ridden person. I feel like part of my life project has been walking up to things that freak me the fuck out and just doing them because otherwise I’d be mad at myself. That’s really important to me.

I feel like any good thing that’s ever happened to me in my life has been a result of making and sharing a zine and just letting it travel where it goes.

My primary means of self-expression and creating always involved things that were really personal and involved really low numbers—like making zines or writing graffiti. This makes sharing my music feel very complicated. I spent a lot of time making this thing—I kind of love it, kind of hate it sometimes, love some parts of it more than others sometimes—and now I’m supposed to share it with thousands of people and always appear like I feel great about it and that I think it’s the best thing on earth, when sometimes I do feel that way and sometimes I don’t.

The biggest challenge for me with sharing my work with other people initially, was a lot of the messages in it were lost on the audiences I was showing it to.

It’s funny that sharing things has become kind of a weird and essential part of both my creative practice and my relationship building, through this “I send you this thing, you send me that thing.”

Maybe you’re able to get your ideas on paper or canvas or on an album or whatever in a much clearer way after you feel like you’ve kind of mastered something, but there’s also something truly magical about starting something new, about not knowing what the fuck you’re doing. I’m always kind of chasing that. I’ll be honest with you, I still hear that goddamn critic go, “You don’t know what you’re doing!” I hear it and I’m like, “Where did you come from?” It’s just fear.

The thing that works best is having an ambitious deadline, because then there’s fear in my heart and I’m like, “Okay, I really have to do this.” There’s a kind of stress or anxiety that motivates.

Often we’re the ones limiting ourselves through fear of failure or fear that we’re not going to fit other people’s expectations. But that’s in our heads.