Daily Inspiration Quote by Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron’s line lands like a darkroom correction: stop treating your mood as proof of your value. As a photographer who began her serious work later in life and fought for recognition in a male-dominated Victorian art world, she knew how easily “worth” gets outsourced to gatekeepers - critics, patrons, even the polite condescension of an era that preferred women as muses rather than makers. Her phrasing is bluntly diagnostic. “Misplaced our power” isn’t therapy-speak; it’s an accusation about authorship. If your creativity is throttled by anger or depression, the real theft happened earlier: you handed your inner authority to someone else.

The subtext is craft-minded and political at once. Cameron isn’t denying that the world undervalues artists; she’s pointing out the second injury artists do to themselves by letting that undervaluation set the terms of their self-regard. That’s why the sentence pivots from emotion to economics: “determine our worth,” “undervalued.” Creative despair becomes a pricing dispute you keep litigating with people who never meant to pay.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to romanticize suffering. Victorian culture loved the idea of the tortured genius, but Cameron reframes torment as a symptom of bad governance: you let an external market dictate internal legitimacy, then rage at the exchange rate. It’s a call to reclaim the “power” that actually fuels art - not attention, not applause, but the right to declare your work real before anyone agrees.