The internet is loud.

Every moment, someone somewhere is uploading a masterpiece — a painting that looks effortless, a film sequence that feels cinematic, a brand campaign polished until it gleams. With a single scroll, you can travel through a hundred creative worlds, each one more refined than the last.

For creatives, this should be beautiful.
And sometimes, it is.

But there’s a quiet side we don’t talk about often enough; the way this constant stream of brilliance can make your own work feel small before it has even taken its first breath.

We all start by borrowing — a color palette here, a mood there, a rhythm, a silhouette, a structure. Every creative lineage begins in imitation. It’s not failure; it’s apprenticeship. Inspiration is the first language we learn.

But comparison is different.

Comparison is what happens when you hold your sketch up against someone else’s finished painting… then punish yourself for the difference. It’s what creeps in when you forget that every creator you admire has spent years, sometimes decades, finding the thing you’re still searching for: their voice.

And voice cannot be rushed.

It grows slowly, like something learning the shape of its own light.
It forms in the quiet — when you’re experimenting, failing, trying again, making things that don’t look like anything you’ve seen before, unsure whether they’re good but certain they’re yours.

The danger of the internet is that it never pauses long enough for this silence to exist.
You see everyone else’s clarity before you’ve had time to explore your own.
You see everyone’s style before yours has taken its first steps.

It’s no wonder so many creatives end up feeling stuck — not because they have no talent, but because they have no space.

Space to try.
Space to be wrong.
Space to grow without an audience watching.

What I’m learning — and what I think more creatives need to hear — is that your voice will not appear fully formed. It will develop in layers. It will echo the artists who raised you creatively. It will wobble, shift, break, reform, contradict itself, and eventually stabilize into something that feels like home.

And that’s the point.

Your voice isn’t one moment of genius. It’s a long conversation with yourself. So take inspiration generously — let it challenge you, guide you, fuel you. But give yourself permission to wander without comparing. Let your early work be messy, naive, unpolished. Let it be influenced, then let it drift away.

Allow silence a seat at the table.
Allow time to shape you.
Allow your own ideas to breathe before you measure them against the world.

Because beneath the noise — beneath the scrolling, the saving, the moodboards, the “Why doesn’t my work look like that yet?” — there’s a quieter truth waiting for every creative:

You already have a voice.
It’s just waiting for you to stop listening to everyone else long enough to hear it.