Someone to Handle the Talent

on being a diva

A little BTS: Margo and I love writing about passion projects and creative work and doing things we care about so a few months ago we did a sprint and wrote a bunch of riffs on these topics because we were excited about starting a conversation about this stuff with you all. We’ve got a shared folder with a bunch of drafts in it and Margo goes in and picks one, edits it, and then posts it.

I put some things in that folder that were in very very very SFD form. I figured we would come up with a highly evolved editing process and the drafts would get smoothed out and polished before being publicly consumed. That hasn’t happened. Margo likes some of them the way they are and so she shares them with you here.

That’s fine. Except when the writing is mine and I happen to have forgotten what I wrote and then see it and feel a teeny tiny bit < insert all of the big feelings > about it.

Here’s an actual text exchange from last week when Margo published the piece I wrote about running my first marathon.

In short, I saw the piece outside of the drafts folder and wanted to crawl in a hole and die.

It’s self-indulgent.

It’s peak navel-gazing.

It’s too personal.

It’s sentimental and flimsy.

It’s…it’s…it’s…

The tailspin was swift and all-consuming.

But here’s the great mercy: I’ve got Margo and Margo also writes things and understands how it feels to take a story that you care about and do your darndest to put words around it despite your knowing that this is a mostly futile task because how do you describe the most meaningful experiences and ideas and feelings with words???

So anyway, the spin-out began and I let it happen. I didn’t smush it down or pretend to be cool about it. I let it rip via text.

This is why we need creative allies. I got the self-conscious squirms out and Margo said – I’m paraphrasing here – cool, now get back to work.

And here I am writing again.

We need friends like Margo because we need someone to handle The Talent.

When I’m behaving like a diva and making empty threats about never writing again, I need someone to calmly hear me out and tell me they’ve been there too and then gently encourage me to maybe consider getting back to work.

It’s really hard for shame to take us out of the game when we realize that what we’re experiencing is simply human. There isn’t anything wrong with us. There’s an emotional hangover that comes from putting work we care about into the world. This is how it feels to make and share stuff we are about.

You’re going to keep running into yourself in ways that make you cringe when you create stuff you care about. It’s a bit like hearing your own voice on a voicemail. Do I really sound like that? Yikes. Unless you have a plan to deal with the spin-out, you’re screwed. You’ll pretend your SFD never happened and walk away. 

Creative allies fish us out of our shame holes, dust us off, and get us back to work. 

This is why we need one another. This is why we create in community. 

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Speaking of community…

If you’re looking for some creative allies who will pull you out of creative purgatory when you start to spin-out and get stuck, Brainstorm Road will be taking new members in January. We’re a community of everyday people working on creative projects and getting better at sharing our work in public.

We’ll give you more details when we finish polishing up our website.

In the meantime, meet people who will encourage your creative pursuits🎨🤖👩🏽‍💻✍🏽🕺🏼 and get going on your Dream Project by becoming a paid Substack subscriber. You can get started with our daily prompts today and get invited to our next monthly meet-up.

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