Why Creatives Who Care Most Often Avoid Most

Not because we don’t want to do the thing. Because we want it too much.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Not because we don’t want to do the thing. Because we want it too much…

There is a very specific version of the above that I recognise in myself, and I suspect you might recognise it in yourself as well. And that version starts quite reasonably: I sit down to write. I have the time, I have the idea, I have the coffee (the first one). And then, almost immediately, I find an email that needs a response. It’s not super urgent, but it would be good to get it out of the way. Oh, let’s just quickly check the social media accounts while I’m at it and send a few replies. Then there’s the thing I meant to google last night that I remember all of a sudden. Next, something about my workspace starts to bother me, and I clear it first. Aaaaand we shift from coffee to getting the water…

By the time I actually open the document, I have spent something like 45 minutes doing everything except the thing I came here to do. I used to call this procrastination, but I also think that’s the least useful word we have for it?

Because procrastination as a concept describes what you’re doing without touching on the why. You’re delaying, but delaying what, exactly?

If you were avoiding the work, you would simply not think about it. You’d put it off and feel fine. But you don’t feel fine. You often feel a low-grade dread when you’re doing all that email-checking, while the actual thing is there, waiting still.

And I don’t think we’re really avoiding that thing, but rather the experience of doing said thing. We’re avoiding what it feels like to be someone who cares this much because that sometimes also means finding out if the caring was really worth it.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, we call this experiential avoidance: the attempt to dodge internal states that feel threatening or just uncomfortable. Anxiety, self-doubt, the exposure of putting something you made into the world. So what we’re avoiding isn’t really the task; we rather avoid the feelings it brings up. And the thing about avoidance is that it works (at least in the short term), which is exactly why it becomes a pattern. So while it seems to make intuitive sense, it also costs us.

Why creatives who care most often avoid most

We sometimes like to sweep under the carpet that the people who struggle most with starting are not the ones who don’t care about their work. They are, almost universally, the ones who care so much that it at times stops feeling safe.

If the work doesn’t matter to you, the blank page is just a blank page. You can produce something mediocre without it touching your sense of self and move on. But if the work is connected to your identity, if the writing or the music or the creating is deeply connected to your self-worth, then sitting down to create stops being neutral, and becomes about who you are. Every creative session holds the possibility of confirming your fear that you are not quite what you hoped.

So of course your nervous system would rather want you to do something else instead because its job is to protect you.

The people most likely to be paralysed before they start are often the people for whom the work means the most because avoidance tends to be proportional to the stakes. And the shame that follows (“why can’t I just sit down and do the thing I say I want to do?”) is not evidence that something is wrong with you but rather that you care so much that you stopped being able to be casual about it.

I’ll say it out loud

I lived all of this for a fairly long time. Intellectually, that younger me understood I was procrastinating, and I could identify the patterns and even name what I was avoiding. But the shame that was triggered by it (“a person who really wants to write would just write, so why don’t I?”) turned into its own problem: Because now I wasn’t just delaying the work, I was also ashamed of delaying to top it all off. And shame reliably produces more avoidance...

It’s worth sitting with that for a moment, because it’s where a lot of creative people are stuck:

It’s not really about the procrastination as such; it’s about being ashamed because you procrastinate.

A real writer wouldn’t do this. A real musician wouldn’t feel like this. And before you can blink twice, the struggle to start turns into evidence of being a fraud.

I don’t believe that anymore of course, neither for myself nor for the people I work with. I believe the struggle to start is often down to caring very deeply, and caring that much is not a character flaw.

It is, however, a problem if it stops you from doing the thing.

I’m not going to tell you to just start. I find that kind of advice a bit useless because the people who can “just start” are the people least likely to be paralysed in the first place (not rocket science, I guess).

I’m also not going to tell you that if you fix your morning routine or meditate for twenty minutes before you open your laptop, the dread will dissolve. It won’t, and believe it or not, the goal isn’t to make it stop. The goal is to be able to create with it present, rather than spending your creative time managing it from a safe distance.

It’s a very different kind of psychological work, but (at least in my experience) the only kind that actually helps.

The “45 minutes” still happen to me sometimes. I occasionally still reorganise things and check my email and the Internet before I begin. The difference is that I no longer take it as evidence of something broken, just that what I’m about to do matters to me.

That reframe doesn’t make the avoidance disappear, but it does change what I do next…

---

• If any of this is landing close to home: You can find out more about the work I do with creatives here:

• Choose a free or paid subscription to stay in the loop.

• Share The Creative Cure with your creative friends.

---