Creative Block Is Just Performance Anxiety With a Fancier Name
The worst thing I ever wrote became the best thing I ever published, and I still can't fully explain how that works.
Hi Friend,
Welcome to the new edition of “The Healthy Creative.“ I hope these articles help you in building a healthy creative life - both mentally and physically.
I need to tell you about my friend Sahil.
Sahil is a copywriter. Has been for about seven years. Good at it, too. The kind of writer who can take a boring product brief and turn it into something you actually want to read. Clients love him.
He delivers on time, every time, clean copy, sharp headlines, the whole package.
But Sahil has a secret, and he told me about it last year over the worst coffee either of us had ever tasted. We were at this new café in Koramangala that had more plants than customers, the kind of place where the latte art is better than the latte.
“I haven’t written anything for myself in two years,” he said.
I almost choked on my oat milk whatever.
“Two years?”
“Two years. Not a blog post, not a journal entry, not even a drunk 2 AM note on my phone. Nothing.”
This is a man who used to write short stories on the weekends. Who had a half-finished novel on his laptop that he’d talk about with this light in his eyes. Who once told me writing fiction was the only place where his brain felt like it was playing instead of working.
Two years of silence.
I asked him what happened.
He took a sip of that terrible coffee, made a face, and said something I’ve been thinking about ever since.
“I sat down to write something good, and my brain froze. Like a deer in headlights. Every sentence I typed, I’d delete it because it wasn’t smart enough or original enough or whatever enough. So I’d close the laptop and tell myself I’d try again tomorrow. And tomorrow became two yea
rs.”
He laughed when he said it. The kind of laugh that’s covering something heavier underneath.
1/ When Brilliance Becomes the Enemy
Here’s a question.
When was the last time you did something creative without judging it while you were doing it?
Think about that for a second. Actually think about it.
Because I asked myself the same question when Sahil told me his story, and my honest answer was that I couldn’t remember.
Every time I sat down to write, there was a voice running alongside the words.
Is this good? Is this original? Has someone said this better already?
Would someone read this and think I’m a fraud?
The voice sounds like quality control, like it’s protecting you from embarrassment. And it’s the single most destructive force in any creative process, because it shows up before you’ve even made anything worth judging.
Sahil’s standards were just arriving before his sentences could.
I’ve seen this in so many creative people. Filmmakers who can’t start shooting because the script isn’t perfect. Musicians who have forty voice notes of melodies but zero finished songs. Writers, like Sahil, like me on my bad days, who sit down with the intention of writing something brilliant and produce absolutely nothing.
You know what nobody tells you about creative blocks?
They’re performance anxiety. That’s it. That’s the whole diagnosis. You’ve confused creating with performing, and now every blank page is a stage and every sentence is being watched by an invisible audience that will judge you if you’re anything less than extraordinary.
No wonder the brain freezes.
“Creative block is stage fright with a laptop. The audience is imaginary, and the stage is your kitchen table.”
2/ The Garbage Experiment
I told Sahil about something I’d tried on myself during a particularly dead stretch of writing.
