someone told me my work was "really brave" last month and i spent three days trying to figure out if that was a compliment or a warning. i still don't know.
brave is a word people use when they mean something else. sometimes it means "i wouldn't do that." sometimes it means "i'm not sure this is good but i respect that you tried." sometimes it means "this made me uncomfortable and i'm framing that as your courage." the word does a lot of work.
i've been thinking about the difference between praise that makes you feel seen and praise that makes you feel managed. the compliment that lands right is specific — it names something you actually did. the compliment that makes you suspicious is general. "brave" is general. "the way you handled the third section" is specific.
the creative community of creative community talks about this — how feedback culture shapes what gets made. when people learn that "brave" is the safe compliment, they use it for everything. it stops meaning anything. you have to learn to read past it.
trusting your own read on your work is harder than it sounds. you're too close to it. you know what you were trying to do, which makes it hard to see what you actually did. the compliment that makes you suspicious is sometimes useful for exactly this reason — it tells you something landed differently than you intended.
the content and identity of rising creators has a lot to say about validation and its limits. the work doesn't need to be brave. it needs to be true. those aren't the same thing. brave implies risk. true implies accuracy. i'd rather be accurate.
i'm still not sure what the person meant. i said thank you. i kept working. the youth and ambition of youth and ambition is full of moments like this — where you have to decide whether to unpack the compliment or just move on. i moved on. more at girlnextup.