Nobody is truly original. But nobody has ever been you before either. That’s enough to work with.

Two things are true at the same time here, and most people only hold one of them. Everything you make is assembled out of what you have absorbed, and nobody else has absorbed the same things in the same order with the same life attached. So originality is not a matter of inventing from nothing. It is what happens when a particular person processes common material.

Stop auditing your influences for proof that you are unoriginal. Make the thing and let your own interests, mistakes and obsessions do the work they will do anyway. The more honestly specific you are, the less it will resemble anyone else’s.