Do Not Underestimate Yourself When They Underestimate You

On being misunderstood, dismissed, delayed, ignored, and still refusing to abandon the vision.

Artist you are so fucking powerful. Your ideas, vision, and creations are needed. You are a visionary. You are a trailblazer. You are inevitable.

And a lot of the time, people are not going to see that.

They are going to look at you, your art, and not recognise what they are seeing. Those moments are going to suck. It’s going to feel incredibly frustrating. Maybe even heartbreaking.

These are also sliding door moments. Forks in the road, where you can either agree with them or you can fucking back yourself.

This is an essay about how to handle the pain of being underestimated, how to stay empowered when you are being treated as though you have no power, how to maintain agency when you are being denied it.

More often than not, the creator knows the potency of their own work before anyone else does.

This happens a lot when it comes to bringing your art to institutions. The musician submitting their music to a label. The writer asking an agent to consider a book. The painter waiting for representation from a gallery. The film-maker pitching their decks to production companies. Though institutions are no longer the only route success as a creator, a lot of creatives (including me) will still spend time trying to convince these people that our art is fucking THE BOMB and they should invest in it.

During this process, we will at some point be misunderstood, underestimated or made to feel insignificant. When you take your projects to the institutions, you more often than not have to watch people handle your work as though it were a problem to be managed, an inconvenience, another email to read …when you are pretty fucking sure it is the beginning of something much bigger than their meeting notes can hold.

But this experience will happen to you. So how do you deal with it?

Do not underestimate yourself when they are underestimating you.

The dangerous part is when their uncertainty becomes your uncertainty.

When their hesitation or disinterest makes you feel foolish for having vision.

When their slowness to respond makes you think your work has stopped moving.

They might make you feel small, but you must not behave small.

I am not asking you to stop doubting yourself. Doubt is part of this. We doubt because we care. Because what we are doing is vulnerable. Because nothing is certain. Because we have been taught to overestimate the institution and underestimate the artist. There will almost certainly be an an internal voice that says, maybe they’re right. Maybe I have overestimated myself. Maybe this is ridiculous. Maybe I should shut the fuck up, change my tune, acquiesce, take scraps. I am not asking you to eliminate this voice, I am asking you to care for that voice. To have the other side of the conversation ready.

What is the other side of the conversation, you ask? It is spoken by the part of you, no matter how small, that knows you’re sort of fucking brilliant. Inevitable. Meant to be. This is the part of you that must be encouraged. The ‘delusional’ part of you.

To be a Successful artist you must be delusional.

When I tell you to be delusional, I don’t mean cold dm’ing Beyonce asking if she could help you promote your album, or hounding people in the industry with incessant emails. I don’t mean that you should go about yelling at people that aren’t taking you seriously. I mean you must back yourself with wild audacity, even when others are lukewarm or disinterested in you and your creations. You persist, in the face of disinterest.

The other day, in a situation where I was experiencing a very lukewarm response, I found myself thinking: holy shit, do you even know how brilliant I am? Do you know how capable I am? Do you understand that I am only getting better and better? I did not say this out loud, but I said it to to myself.

To which a small voice responded: WOAH pipe down you fucking egotistical psycho.

To which the other voice responded. No, darling. I will not deny myself the truth. I know you’re scared, and I know this is frustrating, but the truth is, we have so much to give this world. I am a creative force. I am exceptional, and only becoming more and more brilliant. This is the truth.

This voice is correct. She is not socially acceptable. In fact she exists in spite of society telling me to pipe the fuck down. She exists because I keep proving to her that I am exactly what she claims we are. I prove it by being brave, creating, sharing, persisting. I keep proving to myself little bit by little bit that I am a little bit brilliant. She exists because I let her speak. She exists because I do cool shit that proves her right. She gets stronger because I let her take the lead. She is a very, very good leader.

I want you to have a voice like this in your head. I want you to cultivate a part of you who backs you and champions your work in audacious ways. This voice doesn’t believe you are invincible. They are not insane. They are not conceited - they just absolutely know you have something to give, and that it must be given. They are stubborn and they are convicted. Find or create a part of you who knows you are inevitable.

This is the delusion I speak of.

Do not waste your energy trying to convince them of your magic.

As I sat in the lukewarm, disinterested meeting, I said these ‘delusional’ things to myself. I am a fucking powerhouse. These people are missing out. I am only getting better. But I did not stand up, point fingers, and tell everyone “you’ll regret this! You’re missing out on something HUGE!” I did not want to waste my energy bending over backwards trying to get people to see my brilliance, I simply want to continue being brilliant. I do not want to beg someone to take me seriously when I am already taking this deadly seriously. I do not want to use my creative energy trying to convince someone I doing something cool. It is exhausting, and it makes me feel small and silly. When I am nothing of the sort, and nor are you.

When you are underestimated, do not spend time convincing them that they are wrong. It is beneath you, artist. You are a creative. A visionary. They don’t get it. You do not need them.

DO NOT LET THEM TURN YOU INTO A VICTIM.

You should also be careful about allowing their underestimation to poison you. I experience acute frustration that can border on anger when I am casually underestimated while trying to build something enormously magical. The feeling of being ‘reigned in’ or ‘held back’ or even just made to wait is one of the hardest emotional sensations I experience. I find it agonising.

But this anger or feeling of being wronged can poison an artist if it is harboured too long. If we we truly take on the archetype of the victim, we lose creative power. We lose agency. We lose. If the anger calcifies to bitterness, we poison our creative work. We must make sure we are not suppressing the pain of this experience. I am NOT asking you to put on armour. Do not develop a thick skin. Stay soft, feel. But do not let it fester. Alchemise the anger into creative energy.

You are not powerless. You can still create.

The solution to being underestimated is always to return to the art.

These institutions are DISTRIBUTIVE CHANNELS. They are not the WORK.

I refuse to use my energy considering, “Who should I email?”, “Why haven’t they replied?”, “What does this silence mean?”, “Am I important to them?”

I refuse to burn through my energy with anger: “Wow they made a huge mistake,” “This is so unfair!” “They’re idiots!”

I do not want to submit to the heavy lethargy of thinking, “I am nothing without them”, “Guess no one wants me”, “Maybe they’re right.”

I will use my energy to consider this: What does the work want next? What is the next fucking potent thing I can create and share? Where is the next opportunity to be brilliant?

I must take any frustration and impatience from being misunderstood or underestimated and use it keep writing, sharing, building my ideas, being more brilliant.

Here is a journal entry about a project that was swiped aside by many, but is turning into one of the most fucking fantastic pieces of art I’ve ever made:

I am going to make this idea so fucking potent, so alive, no one is ready for it. I am undeniable and so is this idea. And it does not wait for anyone. I do not want to waste my time and energy, as an artist of this caliber, trying to convince people of it. I do not want to wait for approval.

You have to learn to hold your own vision before the world knows what to do with it.

To abandon your vision because no one yet understands it, is to lose something the world will never see ever again, in all of time and space.

You have to learn to continue to hold your art when people are apathetic about it, because you will know your creation has something to give before the institutions do, before the culture does. It is hard to be the first that knows, but it is the artist’s job to come first. Creatives are the ones who think beyond of what is already in front of us. We are the innovators. We are the trail blazers. We are the ones that use our imaginations to imagine more and that means a lot of people are going to look at us and go…. huh?

I know it is hard to feel the urgency of your creation, and to feel no urgency is response, but stay the course. You are onto something. Trust your taste, your vision, your art.

Amie.