How deeply does your own lack of confidence infect the perception of the work that you produce? Or does it only manifest in the quiet moments when you are alone? Perhaps it primarily asserts itself when you are around those you trust, because you use them to fight back against the way you invalidate yourself. Works perfectly fine until you depress them so much on the subject that they don’t want to defend you from yourself anymore.
Self doubt really is just an internalised echo of the doubt that others gift you to explain away their own surrender to the doubt that was gifted to them; it is the worst form of regifting possible. For some writers and creatives the doubt overwhelms the ability to create, and this is one of the saddest things ever. In the case of someone like Kafka you have to rely on a friend who rescues the work from Kafka’s self-doubt, and there are other cases too – I believe Carrie or some Stephen King text was rescued by his wife.
I push it out and get it out there, and then hope that it swims and survives in some ways outside my orbit, and most of the time it does. For me there is not so much pain in the creation of work, it is more in the consideration of it once it has been produced. I am trying to handle this in my self.
I always figure that talking about the self doubt and the trials and tribulations of writing helps much better than pretending the whole process is a smooth one, because some new writers or creatives beat themselves up because they aren’t finding it as easy as some people would lead you to believe it is.