If you can’t hear your own ideas, turn down everyone else’s for a while.

Your own ideas are quiet, especially early on. When you take in other people’s work constantly, the loudest recent thing sets the shape of whatever you make, and you lose the ability to tell an idea apart from an echo. Silence is not emptiness here. It is the only condition where your own thinking gets enough volume to be heard at all.

Take a few days off the feeds that feed your work. No reference hunting, no scrolling other people’s versions. Sit in the boring quiet and write down whatever surfaces, even the small stuff.