Your influences are ingredients, not the meal. Cook something they’ve never tasted.

Everything you love gets absorbed and eventually comes back out, and that part is normal. The trouble is stopping at imitation, which is what happens when only one thing went into the pot. Three or four influences mixed with your own life turn into something unrecognizable. One influence, carefully copied, just becomes a thinner version of the thing you admired.

List the five things shaping your work right now. If they all come from the same corner, go find something far away, another decade or another country. Set it beside the rest and see what it changes.