A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Making pictures and writing stories for a living is great, until you put them out in front of people, and everything you may ever have enjoyed about it all can evaporate in a moment with one “You suck.”

Making yourself mercifully free of the good opinion of others may render you impermeable, but you might simply be autistic.

I go through periods of feeling comfortable with my work, and criticism flows from me like water off a duck’s back.

But a lot of creators won’t admit any weaknesses at all. It’s like giving their enemies a free shot.

A past acquaintance was one of those foul weather friends who could not resist repeating back to me any doubt I had expressed of myself as if he had just thought of it. He had the imagination of a brick, never an original observation in his entire life, and I finally realized that there was NO FREAKING WAY I could ever tell him a single doubt or concern, because he would be repeating back to me what I had already said of myself, and regurgitating all to everyone in his vicinity as if he had discovered something shiny and dangerous like uranium.

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