I’m writing a five-part series on creativity: what blocks it, what unlocks it, and how you can move through it into something new and exciting. At a young age, I suppressed my creativity and didn’t unblock it until my late 20s. When I did, it came pouring out in both business and art. It opened up by way of curiosity, and it’s been helping me navigate ever since.
I don’t think my story is unique. Many of us learned early on to put creativity in a box once we were exposed to criticism, self-awareness, and judgment. This series is a framework to open it back up and move toward what you want.
I spent most of my life thinking that I wasn’t creative, and yet I loved everything about writing, art, and craft. From a young age, I drew and wrote poems and learned how to crochet, cross stitch, and do other creative things. Somewhere along the way, I lost the plot. I didn’t know being an artist was a career option. I compared myself to others and created an ideal I couldn’t possibly live up to. It stopped me from even trying.
It wasn’t until my late 20s that I began to rediscover my creativity. Since then, I’ve developed a regular creative practice alongside a mental practice that rewires the way I think about my work.
While I was in college, I told myself I had to be XYZ to get employed, do XYZ to get promoted, work for a big company, etc. If I’d kept believing all of those things, I probably wouldn’t have started my own business, had a successful exit, and then done it all over again within five years.
There are many different ways we block ourselves from growth, from expansion.
What’s stopping you from being creative? Hint: it’s not money or talent. It’s not more time or the right art supplies, the right job, or other people either.
DUN DUN DUN. It’s you. Hey—yeah, sorry. It’s you.
It could have been someone else telling you something about yourself at an early age that you began to believe. But now it’s the noise inside your own head. Stories you’ve been repeating in your brain so long you forgot they’re just stories.
Stories show up everywhere, not just at work or while painting or parenting or running. Your life is shaped by your belief system, which is a form of narrative.
What’s the best thing about narrative? You can edit it.
So let's talk about what's actually in the way and how to start rewriting it.
The problem: the story you’re telling yourself. Like my story above, we hear something about ourselves or we totally make it up and live with it as if it were fact for the rest of our lives. “I’m not smart/talented/creative enough.” “I’m not worthy.”
The edit: Write the story down. Imagine you are telling the story about someone you love. How does that change how you feel about the story. Seeing it on paper outside your head is the first step to recognizing it as a story and not a fact.
The problem: the cringe factor.1
Vulnerability gets mistaken for oversharing. Visibility causes bullying or criticism. Authentic expression gets mistaken for self-indulgence. We perform for a jury made up of ourselves.
The edit: Make or do something that makes you feel cringe and show a few people you trust.
The problem: the good trap. The “good” trap is just you and your own impossible standards. You start categorizing everything as good or bad before you’ve even made it, and that binary is not a healthy way to view creativity. I just wrote about that!
I was scared to start the creative practice because I was fixated on the gap between what I wanted to make and what I was capable of making at the time.
The edit: Make something bad on purpose. Seriously. It breaks the spell.
The problem: the comparison trap. Comparing yourself to others is toxic. I did it so frequently in the beginning of my art making and all it did was leave me feeling empty and bad. I always felt defeated, and it demotivated me.
The edit: Find your actual baseline in order to find answers. They are in your own work, not someone else’s.
The problem: the “what if it’s wrong” trap. The fear that if you follow something and it doesn’t pan out, you’ve wasted time. What if this isn’t IT? What if I commit to the wrong thing? So you stay in mild curiosity forever. Collecting, researching, thinking about it, but never actually following anything all the way. It feels like caution. It’s actually just another form of the permission problem.
The edit: There is no wrong direction when you’re following something genuinely gravitational. Every path you follow builds the map. Every next step leads you closer to your goal, your new life, your next thing. There are no wrong steps. You only see how it all connects looking backward, never forward.
The problem: permission. You’re waiting for someone to tell you it’s okay to start. A credential, a course, a promotion, a new studio, the universe, or “Let me just get through this week.”
Time and readiness are the most believable excuses, but the real blocker is permission.
The edit: Start before you’re ready.
This is all just conditioning—and conditioning can be unlearned. And you can learn new ways of moving through the world.
Nobody is ever ready… so the question is whether you’re willing to give yourself permission anyway.
If any of this resonated, I’m glad. Go on to next part of this series:
This is the one I’m working on right now.
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