When Putting Your True Self Out There Makes You Feel Anxious and Embarrassed

We all want to be liked and approved of.

For creative entrepreneurs, putting your private self into your public work is often a requirement—or at least it’s a current norm. Confessionary social media posts are in style. Being authentic and honest about your own journey, and sharing that with followers in a way that resonates with their own, is how business is done in the burgeoning creative economy.   For many, this is a challenge because it means revealing yourself in ways that feel deeply uncomfortable. This post is for those of you who are struggling with how to approach this new cultural and business expectation of a blended private/public life.

This is not a post about boundaries—that’s a worthwhile subject but one that has been widely covered elsewhere. This is about that icky feeling of anxiety mixed with embarrassment or shame that you get when you’ve revealed something about yourself publicly that feels very personal. These feelings originate in our primal fear of being rejected by the group. As one of my clients once asked me about putting my own private stories out there for public consumption: “Did anything bad happen when you did that?”

This amorphous “bad” thing that could happen if we share too much or if people see who we really are is the dark storm cloud blocking us from both delving too deeply into ourselves and putting what we excavate out there into the world. We want to be liked, approved of. This is totally normal. The problem is that after a while, being likable becomes unlikable, because it’s not real (or it’s not the whole truth). It’s boring. What we think will make us unlikeable, the stuff we keep buried and private, perhaps even from ourselves, is what provides nuance and depth to our public personalities. Think of it as a painting: you need shadow along with the light to create something with meaningful depth on the canvas.

I’m sure that sounds rather conceptual, but it’s a helpful image to keep in mind, because what people remember is that resonance they have with someone who has revealed themselves to be fully human. Part of this is the relief we feel when we realize we’re not the only screw-up in the room. Part of it is that we have a natural fascination with what in the olden days was termed a “human-interest story.”

Creative entrepreneurs may be required by the current norms of the creative economy to be their own human-interest story, but it also makes good business sense. In a world of product glut, people make purchases based on resonance, fellow-feeling, and values. It’s difficult if not impossible to offer anything truly unique these days. Every time I have a brilliant idea, a 3-second Google search shows me it’s already been done a dozen times.

What you can offer is your unique story, warts and all. Especially the warts. Just as Tolstoy says about families (all happy ones are alike, all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way), our embarrassing, anxiety-producing quirks are what make us unique. Or to put it another way, being “good” always generally looks the same, but our secret struggles, dreams, insecurities, sorrows, and passions are what make us interesting human beings.

So has anything bad happened since I started putting all my “secret” stuff out into the world? Nothing more than the anxiety and embarrassment I tend to feel in waves. My guiding philosophy for putting anything out there is this: the way people receive your work (or you) is 100% about them, and you have 0% control over it. They’re going to judge you either way, so you might as well give them something to chew on!

You won’t ever get all the people to like you. When you start being honest, your overall approval rating probably won’t go down (and may even go up). Some people may decide they no longer like you (remember, this is all about them—perhaps they hate your honesty because they’re not being honest themselves), but some people who didn’t like you before might decide they do.

I can promise you that it gets easier over time. You can start small! Really, really small. Use self-deprecating humor if it helps. It’s all just practice and experimentation. No one’s saying you have to reveal all the stuff. I have many things I don’t talk about and probably never will. I only share stuff that measure up to about a 5 or maybe a 6 on the discomfort Richter scale. I started at 1.

And if you need a final piece of wisdom to ease your mind about sharing your true self with the public, there’s this: often the worst thing that happens is you find out nobody actually cares that much anyway!

Getting Lost Is a Creative Apprenticeship If You Tell the Story Right

Learn to interpret your experiences in a way that points you toward your purpose.

Growing up, I always felt like I had my eyes on a target beyond the horizon. I knew there was something out there for me, but it seemed forever just out of reach. I kept trying for it even when it took me far from home and I felt utterly lost. I’m a seeker, as I think many creatives are. Having no roadmap for your life is exhilarating, but you will get lost. While it feels awful to go through, these times are your creative apprenticeship. Learning how to interpret your lost times can help you build a life that feels more meaningful and purpose-driven. The key is in how you tell your own story.

I’ll give you some examples from my own life of how this works. There have been two times that I’ve felt desperately lost. The first was when I returned from living overseas in my mid-twenties. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I ended up taking any job that came my way. One was at a young internet startup, with all the office culture you’d associate with such a place, and another was at a retirement home that included a dementia ward. I had a master’s degree at the time; none of this work required one. A conventional perspective would be that I was wasting my education or taking work beneath me, but those jobs remain among the most valuable experiences of my life. In retrospect, they comprised my creative apprenticeship in the spectrum of the human struggle of becoming, from youth work culture to the experience of getting old. This period of my life informs my fiction more than any other.

Think of this as constructing your creative resume, except the stuff that goes on it is everything that would look bad on a conventional resume. Take experiences that make you feel like a failure in the conventional realm and reinterpret them from the perspective of the creative realm. Unlike formal apprenticeships, you often don’t know what a creative apprenticeship is training you for until after you’re done. It takes form in the way that you tell your own story in retrospect. No one is going to do this for you, give you a stamp of approval that says “Real Artist.” It is up to you to legitimize your own experiences. And let me be clear: your life experiences do qualify you to be an artist, and you can adopt that identity right now. 

The second time I got lost on my journey was when I was trying to finish my dissertation. I only had the mental and emotional energy to write twenty minutes a day. I’d spend the morning working up to my twenty minutes, drag myself from bed to do them, and that was it for me, day over. It was awful, but I knew not finishing would feel worse, so I kept going. I recovered from the writing by reading advice columns. All of them. Dear Sugar, Captain Awkward, Ask Polly, Carolyn Hax, Dear Prudence, Ask a Manager…. I even read Care and Feeding and I don’t have kids. I read the daily questions, I read the archives, and then I googled “advice columns” to find more.

How pitiful was I? So depressed I spent most of my days in bed refreshing websites in hopes they’d put up another question about problems I didn’t even have. Needless to say, my self-esteem was in the gutter. But something was happening. I started practicing answering each question myself before I read the response. Not for any purpose, just because it was another way to distract myself and pass the time. I began having opinions about the quality of the responses, disagreeing with some, learning from others. And around this time my acquaintances were coming to me more and more about problems they were struggling with…because I gave good advice. After I’d finished my dissertation, I began to see that dark time in my life more constructively. What if it wasn’t wasted time but part of my training for my purpose in the world? There was a lot more that happened along the way, but long story short, I’m now a creativity coach. I didn’t set out with this goal in mind, but reframing my experiences from the perspective of creative apprenticeship helped me get here.

Learning how to tell your own story can help you realize that you are legitimately qualified to express who you are in the world in the way that you choose, and viewing your experiences as training – apprenticeship – can help you tell that story. If you want to live a fully liberated creative life without apologies, it’s essential that you believe from the depths of your being that you have a right to do so. And you do. You’ve earned that right. You’ve got this. You’ve trained for it.

So take a look at your own experiences, and in particular the stuff that conventional mores tell you isn’t valuable. How do you spend your down time, when you aren’t involved in stuff you have to do? What we gravitate toward when we are depleted by life responsibilities shows us what sustains and inspires us. You may be thinking something like, “I spend that time scrolling through IG/binging on Netflix/staring at a wall.” Look deeper. What feeds do you follow, what catches your eye? What do you obsess over? What are you fantasizing about? What do you love learning about? What opens the door to that realm where time disappears and you are fully absorbed by what you are doing/thinking/seeing? This is the creative realm, and the more you learn how to work with the creative energy that permeates it, the more meaningful and purpose-driven your life will feel to you. And you might just discover your life purpose. 

Does Shadow Work Really Help You Be More Creative?

If shadow work sounds exhausting, depressing, or just too woo, this is for you.

This post is now a podcast episode!

I have to admit that I used to internally roll my eyes a little whenever I heard the term “shadow work.” I knew shadow work was a real thing, but it sounded exhausting. My mental health issues mean I already live with a lot of darkness; I didn’t think I had the internal resources for some woo-woo BS that would just make me feel worse about myself. But then I ended up doing some shadow work accidentally, and it was like my creative core broke open and streams of light and color poured out. So, yeah. It works. But it definitely doesn’t have to be a whole big thing with candles and meditation. Here I’ll tell you why it’s worth considering if you’re feeling blocked, and how I got started.

First, let’s demystify this shadow thing. Your shadow is simply the stuff about yourself that makes you feel bad, that you’ve shoved away into a corner of your psyche in a bin labeled “All the Things That Make Me Unworthy” (my unworthy bin has proper title capitalization because being imperfect at that kind of thing makes me feel unworthy. . .go figure). The unworthy bin is accessible, because we like to take that stuff out when we’re feeling especially down and do a nice little PowerPoint presentation for ourselves. But most of the time we work very hard to make sure our unworthiness stays out of sight. We put up caution tape, build a wall, numb ourselves, whatever we have to do to keep all that ugly at bay. 

But our shadow looms large in our everyday consciousness anyway. It underlies our every thought and emotion. Have you ever seen the reverse side of a tapestry, or a piece of needlework? It’s a total mess. But you can’t have the pretty front side without that ugly back side. Creatives need to integrate their shadows in order to function at their highest level of creative potential. There are esoteric reasons for this, but I’m going to stick with the practical here. The main reason to do shadow work is that policing the boundaries around your shadow takes a lot of energy. Our shadow, like the truth, will out, and when we are using our creative energy to keep it down, we have less energy for actual creative work. In other words, it’s not shadow work that’s exhausting, it’s not doing it that’s exhausting.  

Shadow work isn’t actually difficult to do, but it is scary. None of us wants to examine our ugly stuff up close. Our shadow makes us feel awful about ourselves – that’s why we keep it stuffed away in a bin, right? It’s important to understand that the way we typically confront our shadow is not what shadow work is. Usually we only use our shadow to self-flagellate. But shadow work does not involve feeling bad. It’s about liberation. I stumbled into shadow work when I decided I’d had enough of feeling like shit about myself and invented an exercise I call “Embracing the Ugly,” in which I reimagine my ugly in a positive way. When I realized that this was essentially shadow work, I had a moment of clarity. We misfile everything in our unworthy bins. It doesn’t belong in folders labeled “Shameful” or “Bad.” All of it – and I mean all of it – fits into the following categories: 1) Untrue; 2) Not Actually Bad; 3) Totally a Good Thing; and 4) If It Is True, So What? Yes, into all of them at once.

Here’s an example from my own life. One of the secret fears I’ve put into my unworthy bin is that I’m arrogant. It makes me feel sick with horror and shame to contemplate. Why do I fear that I’m arrogant? Because I sometimes have arrogant thoughts, and because some people have told me I’m arrogant. That’s all the proof I need, right? Actually, no. Let’s fit it into those categories: 

1) Untrue. Your thoughts don’t define you as a human being. We all have ugly thoughts sometimes; being aware of them and acting better than those thoughts is what defines you. 

2) Not Actually Bad. You know who has called me arrogant? Men. Why? Because I’m an intelligent, self-confident woman who speaks her mind. Nuff said. 

3) Totally a Good Thing. Every creative needs a certain kind of arrogance in order to put their work out there. Creatives face a lifetime of rejection, even when they are succeeding. In order to sustain their creative spirit they have to personally believe that they are better than any negative or indifferent reception they’ve received, and that other people’s opinions are ultimately irrelevant when it comes to judging the quality of their work. 

4) If It Is True, So What? Seriously, so what? Giving space to these kinds of personalized shame judgements is how we end up exhausting ourselves policing boundaries around our shadow in the first place. People can be how they want and do what they want. You are the only person who needs to approve of you.

I did this exercise with all my secret fears and shames, and I continue to do it every day. It runs like a background program in my mind at this point, and has replaced my former policing of boundaries. The practice has played a major role in my own creative regeneration – for example, I don’t think I would have had the courage to start this website without it. It’s not the only way to do shadow work, of course, but it works for me, and maybe it could work for you. If you decide to give it a try, let me know how it goes!