I had a realization yesterday that hit me with the force of a revelation. It started with a scene from a new hit TV series, watching the protagonist seek an unfiltered truth about what her closest family thought of her life’s work. The answer wasn’t hostility; it was indifference. They simply weren’t fans.

It was a brutal moment, but it unlocked a profound truth about the creative life: the people closest to us are often the hardest to reach.

I couldn’t help but think of how many artists, creators, and thinkers torture themselves over this specific silence. We can have literal millions of strangers connected to our work, yet we feel a gnawing dissatisfaction if two specific audiences aren’t head-over-heels. The first audience is our immediate circle; family, close friends, sometimes even the people who have known us since we were children. The second audience is the actual creator themselves.

There is a recurring theme I hear in many conversations with artists, a tension that seems almost universal. They receive the majority of love, support, and die-hard fandom from seemingly random strangers, while the people closest to them are often their toughest critics, or worse, they simply don’t care.

For a long time, I viewed this as a failure. But I’m starting to see it as a law of nature.

The problem is one of proximity. Your family and friends know you too well. They know you as the person who sometimes eats cereal in your pajamas at noon or doesn’t get fully dressed for a virtual call. They know your bad habits and your insecurities, your routine and sometimes even your secrets. Because they see the human so clearly, they are often blind to the magic of the art. They are sitting in the front row, looking at the sweat on your brow, noticing the nuances of you, while the people in the balcony are the ones seeing the full picture.

Strangers are the universal force. A stranger doesn’t care who you are at home. They don’t care about your history. They only care about how your work makes them feel. This is why we hear stories of superfans who say a piece of art saved their life or kept them sane. To the stranger, the art is a mirror. To your family, it’s just something you do.

This realization brings me to a necessary conclusion about artistic legacy: the most successful creators are the ones who figure out two things early on:

First, you have to make the art that you are in love with. You have to be your own first audience. You must fall in love with the message and the portrayal before anyone else does. If you wait for permission from your living room or elsewhere, you may be waiting forever.

Second, you must accept that your work belongs to the world, not your neighborhood. Strangers are the target audience. They are the custodians of your legacy.

When you stop trying to impress the people who know your name, you are finally free to connect with the people who need the soul of what you’re capable of. And in that exchange, between the creator and the stranger, we find a connection that is perhaps the purest form of intimacy an artist will ever know.