First off, you're not seeing your professors as yourself. They are reflections of you. Your attitude toward them is how you feel about the part of you that teaches you. (can I put more pronouns in there?
)
The practicing for lessons and performances has been done to appease
you all this time. Are you a tough self-critic? You can look at your schooling and say "this is how I've chosen to learn"? This is how I teach me things?
You say "I want my work to please me, and I want my motivation to be my own"... when its always been your own. Do you think you've been using guilt or maybe performance (critiques) to get you to follow your dream?
So you are removing that layer of denial (that the profs are not you) but in doing that, you lost your motivation. You feel a hole or vacuum in that area.
The vacuum you are feeling is because you now don't have anything to push off of to get you going. The impetus to move always (seemed to) come from the outside (the professors). You just removed the profs from the equation and it
feels like there's nothing to get you going. You're waiting for the impulse to come from the outside, because that's what you're used to.
Without the denial there it feels like you're free-floating. The choice to move now has to come from within you since there is nothing to push off of. It is a greater sense of your creatorship which you have asked for, and you have delivered.
Bravo.