Floccinaucinihilipilification **

lifeI got a text from a friend who sings in a choir. "Are you still a tenor?" she asked

"No", I replied, "I'm only a fiver...Half as good as I used to be."

Which, brought me around to thinking about my photography. How good a photographer am I? Is my work really any good at all?

I can be prone to serious bouts of "confidence crisis", when I seriously wonder about the value of my work. Then, at other times, I feel really confident about it. Winning awards doesn't help, as I can easily dismiss the prize as an error of judgment - or if I do tell others about the award, I can be subject to cries of "poser!" from the begrudgers!

I have settled for accepting that if people tell me they like my work (or, better yet, buy it) then they know their own minds and it is, at the very least, good enough for them!

To avoid sleepless nights struggling to solve the riddle of my creative value, I think I'll try and work on gaining a sense of: "I don't know what art is - but I know what I like. And I like some of what I do."

**The longest, legitimate, word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Definition: The estimation of something as valueless.