How do you keep going when someone says something mean about your art, like if it’s worthless or stupid? Or even if they just criticize it? I’m so afraid of criticism because most of the time it just seems like people don’t really want to help you. They just want to put you down.

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I always think something like, “It’s none of my business.”

This is… kind of hard for me to pull apart because it’s something I’m pretty well bombarded with on a daily basis, and sometimes I’m not as good at dealing with it as I wish I was.

I mean obviously that kind of apathy is tough. Because you do care. You can’t help it. You don’t want to separate yourself from your art. It’s YOUR art. Everyone—especially artists, who put themselves out there in a way that’s immediately subject to the most casual, callous judgement from people who are not experts and not sympathetic to you—everyone cares about what other people think. And it hurts if someone says something cruel or needlessly critical about you or about what you’re doing.

But the fact that people can be so casually judgmental is exactly what makes their reactions none of your business. Because you are not their investment. It’s literally not their work, time, skill, or happiness. They don’t know you from Adam. Everything that you used to make that art—your feelings, your experiences—belongs to you and only you. The only thing haters can do is use themselves as the tool with which they judge.

I care more about my art than anyone ever will. You know? That’s a fact. Haters and critics will never hate what I do as much as I love what I do. They just won’t. They will never be me. They will never know what it’s like to be me. They cannot hate more than I love.

So whatever someone says or does is really, truly none of my business. 

Haters will hate, and people will always use art as something onto which they project themselves—they will always do this. That’s part of the definition of art.

But it’s none of your business. You’re in the business of being yourself for yourself. No one else can touch that.

Practice saying it. “It’s none of my business.”