I fail to be more pretentious with my work.

When someone asks me about the things I make, I have a bad habit of clouding how much thought and intention I put int some of these works; research, intentions, ideas I'm trying to explore and convey, the reflections there after, all that emerges from the messy alchemical process of creating.
"Oh, I'm just having fun," isn't a lie, but it isn't the full picture, either.
I guess part of me is overwhelmed by attempting to articulate what I'm trying to do [words have always been a struggle for me, if the grammatical errors don't give that away].
Part of me is uncomfortable with whatever vulnerability that might come about in doing so.
Part of me assumes that explaining all that too much would come across as, well, pretentious.

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I use a lot of gritty, organic textures in my digital work. Reasons: because it looks cool as fuck, its soothing to work with from a sensory angle, and because making something digital [something made of aether almost] feel tangible runs parallel with the way folks like me use virtual community spaces to build, shape, and explore ourselves and ways of forming connection into something we can carry into our meatspace world. There's an interplay there that I am fascinated by.
To put another way: obscuring that line where digital and physical media begin and end feels a lot like how fuzzy the divide between our online lives [or lives outside the 'normal' world, for a lack of a better phrase] and our 'real' lives can be. For someone with my background, this is an important characteristic to explore in my work.

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Maybe "pretentious" isn't the word I'm looking for. "Pretentious" implies a want to impress others, an unearned authority or expertise, someone trying to seem significantly more important than they really are. Deep down I really only want to impress myself [in a "let's see if I can get closer to mastering this goal than last time" kind of way]. I don't think my work is some grand gift from god to the wider culture. But I do think my experiences and views aren't so unique that attempting to express them isn't going to be understood by no one, or is void of value.

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My 30's begin in less than a week. I am moving a small mountain of sketchbooks and drawings from the last 18 years to a more robust storage container. I sift through these pages; half baked ideas, experiments, bored doodles, incomplete comics and worldbuilding concepts, all in which I was struggling to croak out something, like trying to describe hazy shapes you can only see in your periphery. And I did so with the urgency to somehow create a magnum opus about these shapes before I reached the decrypted, ancient age of 25.
Younger me didn't have enough experience to make sense of the shapes they were feeling and seeing, nor enough room and confidence to mention that they were there at all.

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I have a fear of being perceived as merely a maker of pretty pictures. On the one hand, its a safe position to be in--pretty pictures don't have much to say, they can't alienate or be accidentally abrasive, they have wide audience appeal if that's a thing you care about--but on the other, I'd be doing a great disservice to myself pretending that's all this toil is about.

I think what I mean to say is that I fail to be more open with what goes into my work, the intentions, aims, all that noise. I can commentate on the technical details all day long, but I'll admit there are situations where I become coy about that 'fluffy', intangible stuff that guides what I do. And worse, I don't give myself enough space to mull on it.

Didn't give myself enough space to mull on it.