A friend of mine saw my stuff on this blog and said, oh, you should sell your stuff on Etsy. So I went to Etsy and saw literally hundreds of awe- and envy-inspiring pieces, and thought, I can’t compete with this.

So, boy, what a way to depress myself right around the holidays. In today’s instant-connection world, it’s far easier to set the world’s best as your own measure. After all, you can easily view thousands of wonderful crafts, paintings, websites, logos, prints, etc. etc. in an hour’s time and even more easily find yourself lacking. At least before the web, if you avoided bookstores and magazine subscriptions, you could more easily fight off that internal critic.

When I changed careers to become a designer, of course I dreamed of getting my work in the design annuals. Being written up in design magazines. And while I have gotten some awards for my work, it’s fair to say that I am not a household name in the design industry and that’s not likely to change at this point in my middle-age life.

The point of this post? To remind me and any of you out there who have the same depressing thoughts that if you don’t learn to take pleasure in the process of creation, you will be at the mercy of the curse of comparison. That curse paralyzes you from starting anything new because, well, “it’s not going to be any good, so why bother?”

So in the spirit of giving—and to be nice to myself—I remind myself that the creative process should be its own reward.