Why Can't I Take My Own Creative Work Seriously?
The Pattern
You call it a hobby. You call it a side thing. You call it a small experiment. You will spend a thousand dollars on someone else's certification and not buy yourself a chair that fits the desk where you make your work. You wonder why you cannot grant yourself the standing you would instantly grant another person doing exactly what you do. The withholding is not modesty. It is the residue of an early environment that did not regard your interior as the legitimate site of a life.
Origins & Context
The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, in his work on the holding environment, described how the child learns the seriousness of her own interior by being met seriously inside it. The child whose interior was treated as inconvenient, decorative, or beside the point grows into an adult who cannot take her own interior productions seriously without help.
The psychologist Alice Miller, whose work on the gifted child documented the cost of being valued for usefulness rather than for being, described the specific adult pattern in which one's authentic creative output is filed under hobby while one's service to others is filed under work. The filing is a faithful reproduction of the original valuation. It is not a defect of judgment. It is a defect of the early mirror.
The seriousness with which you treat the work is, slowly, the seriousness with which you learn to treat yourself.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the language you use about your own work. You apologize for it. You diminish it. You introduce it with a small disclaimer. You notice the way you talk about other people's work with reverence and your own with embarrassment.
You notice it in the structural choices. You do not protect the time. You do not invest in the tools. You do not call yourself by the noun that describes what you actually do. You notice that the seriousness everyone else can see in your work is invisible to you. The invisibility is the wound.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Holding Environment Deficit (D.W. Winnicott), the early absence of being met seriously inside one's own interior. It is also named as the Gifted-Child Adaptation (Alice Miller), the pattern in which one's authentic productions are filed beneath one's useful productions. The contemporary version is named as Creative Self-Diminishment (Julia Cameron), the linguistic and structural habit of treating one's own art as smaller than it is.
Related entries in this library: Parentification, Self-Abandonment, Adaptive Self vs Original Self.
Nikita's Note
You do not have to feel serious about the work to start treating it seriously. The feeling follows the structure, not the other way around. Buy the chair. Block the time. Use the noun.
The seriousness with which you treat the work is, slowly, the seriousness with which you learn to treat yourself. The work is the doorway. Walk through it.
From the work
The seriousness with which you treat the work is, slowly, the seriousness with which you learn to treat yourself.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.