Spent years chasing other people's light before I found mine

Early on I'd come back from a shoot at some lake or pine ridge and immediately start grading the scan to look like whoever I was admiring that month. Cooler shadows, lifted blacks, that whole palette. And the work looked fine. It looked like theirs.

The problem wasn't the technique. The problem was I couldn't tell you why I made any of those choices. I was borrowing taste without understanding what I actually responded to in a scene. It took a while, honestly a few years of printing and sitting with my own images, before I noticed I kept returning to the same gradients, the same dusk moments, the same patience for flat light that most people would call boring. That was the style. It had been there the whole time, buried under borrowed presets.

I think the uncomfortable truth is you can't force a style into existence. You can only shoot enough, and pay enough attention to your own patterns, that it reveals itself. But that in between period where everything you make feels derivative is genuinely brutal on your confidence.

Has anyone else gone through that phase where you realized you were editing toward someone else's eye instead of your own? How did you start trusting what you actually see?