I still have a hard time being in the room when people watch my work.
I’m better than I used to be. Earlier on, I could barely tolerate it at all. If someone pressed play on one of my films, I’d find a reason to leave. Even now, when I’m showing an edit at work or screening something I made, I feel my body start to react before my brain can catch up. I get restless. I stand up. I pace. Every silence feels loaded. Every shift in someone’s posture starts to mean something. A glance away from the screen becomes evidence. A breath lands too heavy and suddenly my brain is telling me the work is bad, I’m a fraud, and this entire life I’ve built around storytelling is some kind of elaborate misunderstanding.
It’s unhealthy. I know that.
But I also know I’m not alone in it.
When the Work Feels Like a Verdict.
Artistic insecurity is one of the few things that seems to connect artists across forms and experience levels. It shows up when you pitch the idea that feels too strange to survive contact with other people. It shows up when someone watches your cut in silence. It shows up after the work is finished, when praise somehow slides off you but criticism lingers like proof.
I remember pitching Pine Tree in a college screenwriting class years ago. My pitch involved a man who builds a table that can speak. The film would become a kind of road movie, with the man and the table heading toward a traveling circus in search of a high school sweetheart. The reaction in the room was exactly what you might expect: some laughter, some interest, but mostly uncertainty.
That look of uncertainty followed me for years.
Not just with that film, but with the larger feeling that the work I wanted to make might always be met first with confusion. And that confusion, in my worst moments, felt indistinguishable from failure.
That’s the trap.
Because artistic insecurity is rarely just about the work. It’s about identification. It’s about the dangerous habit of collapsing the distance between what you made and who you are. If the work is misunderstood, then maybe I’m misunderstood. If the film doesn’t land, maybe I don’t. If someone critiques the piece, maybe what they’re really critiquing is the fact that I exist in this form at all.
That kind of thinking can poison the whole process.
It also makes feedback harder to use. Every time I get up and pace while someone is watching my work, I’m not just avoiding discomfort. I’m avoiding information. I’m missing the nonverbal cues that could actually help me understand what’s landing and what isn’t. I’m turning reaction into threat instead of data.
You Are Not Solely Your Art.
A filmmaker I admire once told me, when I brought up some version of this anxiety, “That voice never goes away. You just learn to ignore it and work past it.”
I’ve thought about that a lot.
Not because it’s comforting, exactly, but because it’s clarifying. The goal is not to become someone who never feels insecure. The goal is to stop letting insecurity masquerade as truth.
That requires remembering something I still have to remind myself of constantly: you are not solely your art.
Art is personal. It comes from your taste, your obsessions, your wounds, your way of seeing. Film especially encourages this fusion. We’re taught to value authorship, voice, the singularity of the director’s perspective. And that matters. But any single piece of work is still only a partial expression of you. It reflects a moment, a set of influences, a particular stage of craft, a particular version of your concerns. It is not the total sum of your being.
A film is evidence of an artist. It is not the whole artist.
That distinction matters, because without it, every critique starts to feel existential.
And even success doesn’t fix that by itself.
That Voice Doesn’t Get to Drive
This is one of the more frustrating things I’ve learned. For a long time, I believed insecurity would disappear once I crossed certain thresholds. If I got into film school, then I’d know I was worth something. If I made a short film, then I’d know. If it got into festivals, if it won awards, if it got distribution, if I got a full-time job in the industry, if I made a feature… then maybe the feeling would quiet down.
But the goalposts kept moving.
I’ve felt this pattern throughout my creative life. I attach my worth to the next milestone, then once I reach it, the achievement collapses almost immediately into a new condition for self-acceptance. I don’t really get to arrive. I just relocate the burden.
That is not ambition. Not entirely. Sometimes it’s just insecurity in more professional clothing.
I felt that sharply with Pine Tree. The film had a modest festival run. It won some awards. It found an audience far larger than the puzzled faces in that classroom years earlier. And still, I could mostly see the flaws. I could mostly see what I would change. I could mostly feel the distance between the film I made and the one I wish I had made.
But that, too, is part of the maturation process. The person judging the work now is not the same person who made it. Of course I see more now. Of course I would do certain things differently. That doesn’t make the earlier work worthless. It means I kept growing.
And if I’m not careful, artistic insecurity can make me forget that growth entirely. It can convince me to dismiss the labor, the risk, the people who believed in the project, the younger version of myself who made something sincere with the tools he had.
That’s the part I’m trying to resist now.
Not by pretending I’m above doubt. Not by pretending criticism doesn’t sting. Not by pretending every piece of work is better than it is. But by refusing to let my relationship to the work become so fused with my relationship to myself that I stop moving.
Because if I dwell too much on insecurity, I risk becoming less honest, less open, less willing to make the next thing. I risk sanding down the strange edges that made me want to create in the first place.
And for what?
Art doesn’t ask for invulnerability. It asks for continuation.
So I’m trying to practice a different relationship with my work. One where I can care deeply without making every response into a referendum on my worth. One where I can look at an older film and see both the flaws and the courage. One where I can accept that insecurity may never fully disappear, but it doesn’t get to be the thing that decides whether I continue.
That voice may never go away.
But it doesn’t get to drive.
-Adam
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