nanoscopic

I can relate to this. The reason why I do creative things in general is in the hope that somehow they can be shared with others and be of value. I also write purely for the sake of self-expression, but I do feel that quality and longevity is important for creative works. For myself I got into writing initially by keeping a journal I read a number of journals of important historical figures while I was in primary school, and I decided that if I too wanted to be important than I should obviously keep a steady journal as well. Did that over the years, sometimes consistently ( every day ) and sometimes not ( twice a month ). At this point the contents of the collected journal entries are over 400k words. The quality is very random. At one point I had the entire contents posted online publicly, but my family found out about it and got angry and forced me to take it down. More recently I have begun writing a science-fiction novel. I wrote quite a bit in the first month or so of working on it in my spare time. It is about a third the length of a full standard novel at this point. I shared it to some friends and family. Some people said it was really wonderful; others were less appreciative. I also went online and tried to find places and people that would be interested in reading it; sent 6 or 7 emails out but never got any responses. In the end I just kind of stopped working on it because I started to lose confidence in getting useful feedback on it. I do still hope to finish the novel, but it is frustrating to work so hard on something and have people not even have the time to read the first chapter of it, or even the first 5 paragraphs. Generally that is the theme of my life. I spend a tremendous amount of time and effort doing something creative, reach about 50% through accomplishing whatever it is, then I drop the project entirely and move on with my life leaving a half completed corpse of a project. The half completed projects are interesting and valuable in their own right, but I see no point in completing projects that will never "see the light of day."

My main source of stress is work. The project I am on currently is pretty much all or nothing. It lives or dies depending on how well my small team can do with it. To relieve stress I primarily watch anime, but also listen to audio books and/or read ebooks. Each season there seems to be about 4 or so anime worth watching so I end up back-filling with older anime in order to have an hour or so of anime to watch each evening.