The notebook exists. Or the folder on the desktop, or the voice memos that have never been transcribed, or the draft that was started three times and each time abandoned at approximately the same point in the process, which is the point where the work is sufficiently developed to be assessed and the assessment reveals that it is not finished enough to be safely shared but developed enough to clearly indicate what it is, which means it is in the most vulnerable position a piece of work can occupy: clearly something, not yet defensible. It is at this point that the thing stops. The stopping is not a decision. It is the loop’s assessment: this is more exposure than the current conditions support. The work is left at this point until the next time the impulse surfaces and the process begins again and arrives at the same point and the same assessment and the same stopping. The stopping is not about the quality of the work. The work is often very good. The stopping is about the self’s relationship to exposure.
Brené Brown’s research on shame and vulnerability identified creative exposure as the form of vulnerability most likely to activate shame responses, because creative work carries the maker in a way other forms of action do not. The person who submits a report for review is not exposing their interior in the way that the person who shares a piece of writing or a piece of visual work or a business idea is exposing it. The creative work is the interior made visible. It contains the maker’s specific way of seeing and thinking and making connections and attending to what matters. When the creative work is rejected or received with indifference or simply not seen, the experience is not only the experience of the work being found inadequate. It is the experience of the self being found inadequate. At the level of the nervous system, which does not distinguish cleanly between the self and the work that comes from the self, the rejection of the work is the rejection of the self.
The permission structure the loop produces for creative work runs on a committee that does not exist and yet exercises veto power over every creative impulse. The committee is composed of the accumulated critical voices of everyone who ever communicated that the self’s expression was too much, too ambitious, not quite right, not qualified, not appropriate for someone of this background or this status or this perceived level of permission to claim this particular creative territory. The committee is internal. It operates below the level of conscious thought, faster than the deliberate reflection that would allow its authority to be questioned. It runs its assessment in the half-second between the impulse and the action, and in many cases the assessment is completed and the veto issued before the person has consciously registered that an impulse occurred. The work is stopped before it begins. The stopping is experienced as a lack of inspiration, or a lack of time, or a sense that conditions are not yet right.
The financial dimension of the work not made is concrete and often very large. For many people, the work that is most specifically theirs, the work that comes most directly from their specific configuration of capacity and perspective and lived experience, is also the work that would represent the most direct and most substantial translation of their genuine value into economic terms. The book that would have found the readers it was for. The business that would have served the clients it was designed for. The creative work that would have generated the income that the person’s actual contribution warrants. The under-earning that the loop produces is not only the result of undercharging. It is also the result of the work not being made at all, the economic value of the unmade work existing only as absence.
The specific experience of beginning creative work, for people who have been running the loop for years, has a quality worth describing carefully. The beginning is often fine. The impulse surfaces and the permission is granted and the work begins, in the private space where it is still hypothesis rather than assertion. The difficulty arrives at the point where the work is developed enough to be seen. To be shared. The transition from hypothesis to assertion is the transition from the protected space of private development to the exposed space of public existence, and this transition is exactly what the loop has been preventing. The work stops at this transition not because it is not ready but because the loop’s assessment of the cost of the transition is that the cost exceeds the available tolerance for exposure.
The available tolerance for exposure can be increased. It increases through the accumulation of experiences of sharing the work and surviving the sharing, of discovering that the actual cost of the exposure is lower than the prediction suggested, of revising the prediction gradually in the direction of what the actual experience of exposure reveals it to be. The revision is slow. It is the most important creative work available to the person who has been preventing their creative work. Each shared piece is not only a piece of work in the world. It is a piece of evidence that updates the working model. The model that has been predicting catastrophic exposure cost begins, slowly, to predict survivable exposure cost. The next sharing becomes slightly more available. The creative life that the loop was protecting against becomes incrementally more enterable.