Creative Fear Is Creative Too

It wants to convince you that sharing your work isn’t safe

When it comes to the arts, some people are brimming with irrational confidence. They’re the ones who step up to the mic at karaoke night and belt out “Sweet Caroline,” thinking they’re nailing Neil Diamond while they’re really exuding all the sensual swagger of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Others are blessed with justified confidence. They’re the ones who are secure in their talents and know that when they need to perform, they’ll be able to perform. Taylor Swift is a good example of this, and if you think I only chose Taylor Swift because of the SEO implications of including her name—that’s Taylor Swift’s name—well, you’re pretty swift yourself.

Most of us are saddled with fear. We’re the ones who second-guess ourselves, question our abilities, and too often never start that project we’ve been thinking about forever.

One of the biggest ways creative fear messes with us, though, is stopping us from sharing out our work. Now, here’s the ironic thing: creative fear is creative too. It’s great at coming up with all kinds of ways to deter us.

It will tell you that you just need one more round of revisions—over and over and over. It’ll convince you that your carefully constructed characters are in fact hot garbage. It’ll even make you think you’re in danger.

Creative fear wants you to believe it’s protecting you, but all its disguises and slick fast-talking are designed to control you. If it were a cartoon, it would be a manipulative chameleon voiced by Robert Downey Jr. But once you know what’s driving it, things become more manageable.

The reason writers and other artists are often afraid to put their work out there is a holdover from our so-called lizard brain, the area in charge of all the F’s. Besides fear, there’s fight, flight, feeding, freezing, and crowd favorite fornication.

The thinking goes that somewhere deep within us lies the worry that our peer group will reject and banish us. We’ll be outcasts, having to fend for ourselves, and will therefore be more likely to be eaten by a wild boar. So we try not to do anything to upset the gang, like tracking mastodon dung all over the cave, or playing hide-the-spear with Glork’s wife.

Now, I hear you say, “I can count my wild-boar-related near-death experiences on one hand. What does all this have to do with me being afraid to submit my short story, Jack the Ripper Goes to Mars?”

Well, our concern isn’t the boar nowadays so much as the bore; that same self-preservation instinct now would have us believe that people will think our work is terrible, that we’ll be humiliated, and that our friends and family will thus banish us. Then, of course, we’ll die.

In other words, when we encounter situations that might cause us great embarrassment, our panicky nervous systems respond like it’s a literal matter of life and death.

What a drama queen.

That’s why public speaking terrifies so many people. Think about it: the racing heart. The shaky, sweaty hands. Perhaps a soupçon of urine dotting your Underoos. Your brain is urging you to beat it before you’re ripped limb from limb.

Much the same thing occurs when we bare our souls creatively. We put a lot of time and effort into something—an essay, a poem, a painting—and it’s very personal. It’s a part of us. Sharing it publicly is like sending your kid off to his first day of school.

“What if he gets picked on?”

“What if he just really sucks?”

“What if he’s such a mess that the school bans him, as well as any future children we might have?”

I should note that I don’t have kids, so this may not be an entirely accurate representation of parental concerns.

But you get the idea. We put this very important creation of ours out into the world, and that switches on our worst-case-scenario generator.

To be clear, this isn’t impostor syndrome we’re talking about. This is something else. Something more primal. This is your heartfelt work serving as a surrogate for your human worth. Sounds dramatic, right? It is.

Listen, I can’t dance. I’ll do it under duress, but it won’t be pretty, and if there happens to be an EMT nearby, there’s a good chance she’ll rush over out of concern that I’m having a seizure. So if you mock and insult my dance moves, I won’t care. I have no skin in the game, other than painful foot blisters.

I do care very much about my writing, though. As such, I can be a tad sensitive about it. Case in point: the other day someone restacked my last essay, along with the following note: “I liked this a lot more than I expected to.”

This is where logic left the building:

“What do you mean you didn’t expect to like it?”

“Have you read other things of mine that you didn’t like?”

“Why do you hate me?”

I’m exaggerating a little, but those were pretty close to my initial thoughts before I realized that she’d paid me a nice compliment. Then I was free to think, “Oh, cool. She liked this. That’s awesome.”

That’s the fear. Whether I want to admit or not, I’m scared of being judged harshly. I’m scared of looking like an idiot. I’m scared of people telling me I’m not good at the one thing I think I’m pretty good at, which I also happen to love doing. It would hit me right in the old self-worth. And I guess that deep in some dark synapses, I’m scared of being shunned, even though that much alone time does sound tempting.

Then why take the chance? I mean, I can still write whatever I want without slapping it up on Substack or submitting it to another site. If I don’t want to be judged, why put myself in a position to be judged? Why do any of us do that?

We do it to be known. To connect. To be part of the tribe. Meanwhile, fear doesn’t want us to be too known, lest we be kicked out of the tribe.

That’s some M. Night Shyamalan-level twistery right there.

The thing to remember is, the oversized anxiety you feel before you send your baby out into the world is an illusion. It’s your dumb lizard brain. No one is going to kick you out of anywhere. Sure, some people might not care for your work, but that’s okay. By definition, those people aren’t your tribe anyway.

Fortunately, the internet has provided us with much more spacious accommodations. Our personal caves are now enormous, and we’re free to find our own tribes to populate them.

It’s still scary to put yourself out there, but we can keep it in perspective. Even though it may feel like it, it’s not a matter of life and death. It’s more like the risk of tripping in public. If it happens, some callous halfwits may snicker, but they won’t even remember it the next day. And your tribe will be there to pick you up.

So, stare down the fear and post, upload, or submit your stuff to wherever it needs to go. That includes Jack the Ripper Goes to Mars. Now, in this story does he, like, murder Martian prosti—you know what, never mind. It’s not for me, but your tribe is going to love it.