Having a creative identity crisis?
Your best work is on the other side of finding — and accepting — yourself
“I’m going to be living in Europe, so maybe I should write about travel. Or about letting go of things. Or maybe my brand is just… a middle aged white guy who’s an ally to everyone but has no allies of his own.”
My friend chopped up a square of syrup-soaked pancake with the side of his fork and speared it into his mouth with a sigh and a shake of his head. “Nobody wants that.”
He’s a successful TV producer and a former stand up comic, and in those roles he has done a ton of writing. He’s a talented guy. Now he is making a pivot in his life and wants to set himself up to write a book, or several books. He knows that if he wants to succeed as an author he needs to build his platform, and he’s having a hard time getting started because he doesn’t know what his angle should be. He’s trying to pick a shtick.
This is the hurdle where so many smart creatives fall down. We think of ourselves not as artists but as media products. We get so hung up on whether people will want to buy what we’re selling, we remove the truest and liveliest parts of ourselves from the work. It leaves us feeling deflated and empty — and can stop us in our tracks before we even get started.
This is the kind of writer’s block that’s actually a creative identity crisis.
I had this problem myself for many years. I loved writing. I knew I was good at it. But I couldn’t decide what my thing should be. I had lots of interests. I’m into the visual arts, films, media, health and wellness. I’m a giant foodie. And for a while there, I considered building a writing identity around one or more of those things. But you know what? I found that when I sat down to write about them, it felt like a chore. The words didn’t flow.
The problem was that I didn’t care enough about any of these things to plant my flag in them. I felt like I was just writing out of obligation.
So I decided (wrongly) that I just don’t have any good ideas and therefore couldn’t be a writer. Instead I became an editor and have spent the past 25 years working with other people’s words. I still did a lot of writing — proposals, editorial notes, marketing copy. I’ve even rewritten other people’s manuscripts. But it wasn’t MY writing.
When I looked at what I actually loved to write, the writing I was proudest of, it was in my journal. In letters to friends. The occasional personal essay that remained trapped in my laptop because there was no appropriate place to share it.
The stuff I truly enjoyed writing about was all the same stuff that I can’t stop thinking about and talking about: The human condition, our common struggles, my own experience of life, the challenges I’ve faced, the trauma I’ve experienced, the healing I’ve done, and the growth I am having.
Gah, there’s no market for that!
Or is there?
Here’s what I know now. You can’t choose your thing. It chooses you. Finding your creative identity is more a process of discovery than a decision.
Sometimes I’ve thought that it would be so much easier, so much more convenient, if I was more invested in a less personal topic. I didn’t want to be accused of being navel gazing, or being intellectually unserious, or too woo-woo. I basically rejected my core self and went looking for other more “acceptable” topics to pin myself to. It didn’t work.
Sure, I’m capable of writing about food, or media, or the visual arts. But my best writing lives at the intersection between the writing process, healing and growth, authenticity, and my own personal expression. It’s more of a palette than one narrow topic, and that’s great. These things overlap and together they create a unique bouquet of material that is authentically mine.
In this way, finding your identity as a writer is a lot like finding your identity as a human. I could not have found my thing — and in fact DID not find it — until I acknowledged and accepted my authentic self, and then became willing to be seen for who I am.
To help you discover the creative identity that’s already yours, ask yourself these questions:
What do you love to spend an afternoon daydreaming about?
What obsessions have always been with you? What does your attention naturally turn to in between life’s obligations?
If someone were to assign you a topic or a set of topics to be your thing, and they told you that as long as you commit to this thing, you CANNOT FAIL and your work will find its audience, what topic would you hope they would give you?
Write your various interests on a piece of paper. Tune into your body signals. Read each word separately and listen to what your body is telling you. Each topic will produce either a feeling of heaviness and anxiety, like it’s a ride you want to get off, or it will feel like sweet relief. If your rational mind tells you it’s embarrassing, irrelevant, too silly, or too serious, just put your fears about being judged or rejected aside for now, and listen to what your body and spirit are longing for.
That is your thing.
I went into this in greater depth in a recent episode of my podcast, The Selfish Gift. If you want to have a listen, you can find it on all the major podcast platforms, and also here.
I hope this inspires you to embrace your true self and free the writer you were born to be.
Super read! Xo