As an artist, what scares you the most?

Maybe being subjected to something or someone distracting and losing that sense of self. Losing a sense of originality. Maybe lack of passion. Maybe lack of fear of pushing us to be the best version of what we believe is an artist.

Jonah Lorsung is afraid of “giving up that love of sharing someone’s story.”

“I don’t ever want to lose that fire that I have, that I associate with taking photos,” Andrew Blumenthal explains. “My fear is just losing interest.”

What happens when your passion gets lost in the shuffle of everything else?

“Unless you’re working on a personal project, you’re creating for others. I think I’m really afraid of going down a path of working for others and losing a sense of self. I’m afraid my creative drive might become someone else’s,” Sean Davidson explains.

“I fear not finding the work that I hoped for. I fear I’m gonna have to take on the things that make money, not the things that I want to do,” Willem Verbeeck admits.

If we’re being honest, there is some sort of underlying fear that our passions will become something so monumental and so different than what they were before. Sure, that could be great, but what happens to that passion? What happens when we lose our sense of self?

“Things that scare me about my work and growing would be getting distracted by what other people are doing,” Bekks Gunther explains. “My fear of mine is to lose myself in watching what other people are doing.”

When you admire someone else’s work, it’s hard to establish what you take from it: something learned, something inspiring, something that cannot be matched. When it comes to art, we always doubt ourselves. We always stress that we’re not good enough or not original enough or whatever the case. We all have anxieties of wanting to stand out, wanting to be unique, and wanting to be something people are genuinely interested in.

“My creative fears…being unoriginal. But like…everybody is unoriginal. Claudia Saimbert believes.

“My personal fear is being irrelevant,” Emily Suzanne admits, “creating imagery that people don’t respond to or connect with.”

Showcasing your work–whether if it may be on social media or in an exhibit–is a scary thing. You don’t want to try too hard to make people connect with you and your work, but you still want it to happen nonetheless.

Quan Brinson says he’s afraid putting out work that’s just going to make [his] audience go, ‘what the fuck?’ “You don’t want to lose your audience,” he explains.

“I’m incredibly afraid to put out work,” Charlotte Rea tells us.

“The fear is to show work, I feel like. Do I even want to know their opinion?” Lena Shkoda laughs. “I’m not sure.”