Embarrassment Killed It Before Failure Could

I think one of the strangest things about becoming an adult is realizing how many people quietly give up on being creative without ever fully admitting it to themselves. Not because they weren’t talented, and not even because they failed, but because somewhere along the way creativity started sounding irresponsible while practicality started sounding morally superior. And I know this because I’ve done it to myself over and over again.

I used to LOOOVE writing. Not in some dramatic (imagine this in a sophisticated British accent) “I was born to be an author” kind of way, but in a very normal, obsessive kid way where making things up just felt exciting. I loved world building and stories and characters and emotional arcs and all the strange ways ideas could connect together into something bigger. My friend and I used to carry around black composition notebooks and spend free periods writing separately before immediately interrupting each other to pitch plot twists back and forth like we were two executives in a tiny writers’ room nobody asked for. Looking back now, I think what I really loved wasn’t even necessarily the writing itself. It was the feeling of making something out of nothing and then watching another person get excited about it with you. <3

But eventually pRactIcaLity (ugh) enters the conversation. At some point people start explaining ~life~ to you almost entirely through employability, and you begin hearing the same warnings over and over again: writers struggle financially, artists are unstable, filmmakers are broke, creative careers are risky. Slowly, without even realizing it, you start separating your interests into two categories: things you love and things that make sense. Writing pretty quickly got moved into the second category for me.

By high school, I’d already started trying to reshape the dream into something more practical. Journalism felt like a reasonable compromise because people always NEED news and storytelling still mattered there. Writing still mattered there. I wrote for the school newspaper, got really into speech and debate, loved writing speeches and arguments and figuring out how ideas emotionally land with people. Eventually I got selected to attend this journalism conference in DC where they picked one student from each state, and I remember being genuinely excited because these were real journalists, adults who had somehow managed to build entire lives around writing.

And then almost every journalist on stage started talking about how financially difficult the industry was. They talked about instability, low pay, burnout, how hard it was to sustain long term, and I remember sitting there thinking, oh no (😭), here we go again. It’s funny looking back because I don’t think they were trying to discourage us. They were probably trying to prepare us. But when you’re young, warnings sink deeper than nuance does, and I quietly translated the entire experience into: OKAY, this dream is unrealistic too.

So I pivoted toward “real jobs.” (WHAT even is a REAL job?!) In college I started exploring business, consulting, tech, investment banking — all the things ambitious students are supposed to look into when they’re trying to become employable adults. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with any of those careers. I met incredibly smart people doing meaningful work. But I also remember this strange feeling of watching everyone optimize themselves toward success while quietly wondering whether they actually felt alive doing any of it. Maybe some people did, but for me something always felt slightly disconnected. I could understand why a path made sense logically while still feeling absolutely no emotional pull toward it whatsoever.

Eventually I took another break from school because honestly I had no idea what I was doing, and during that time, mostly because I suddenly had endless free time and nobody asking me about practicality for once, I decided to write a book (*gasp*). Not strategically, not because I thought it would become anything, but because the words were there and they just kept coming out. This was before ChatGPT too, which honestly feels important to mention now because it was literally just me sitting alone trying to make sense of things through writing. And weirdly, once I started, the entire thing poured out of me. Over 40,000 words in a couple months. Actual chapters, actual themes, sentences that somehow connected into something coherent and emotionally true. The book was called Creative @ Work, and looking back now I think what I was really trying to understand was how creative people carve out lives for themselves without completely disconnecting from who they are, which honestly still feels like the exact same question I’m trying to answer now. (Funny how life works! lol)

The surprising part was that people actually bought it. It ended up in bookstores. My parents were incredibly proud of me, significantly more proud than I was of myself. One night they invited some colleague over for dinner and excitedly told him I’d written a book that was selling copies and had ended up in Barnes & Noble, and he laughed and basically said, “Oh nice, so are you gonna become one of those starving writers living on your parents’ couch?” What’s funny is that the comment probably wasn’t even malicious, but I swear something inside me immediately went, ALRIGHT, that’s enough of that.

And after that, I genuinely stopped talking about the book almost entirely. There are people in my life who still don’t know I wrote and published a book because I’m weirdly embarrassed that I ever wanted to in the first place. Not even embarrassed by the book itself necessarily, but embarrassed by the AUDACITY of trying. And I think that’s the part I keep coming back to lately because people talk all the time about fear of failure, but honestly I think fear of embarrassment kills far more dreams before they even have a chance to fail. Failure at least requires trying first. Embarrassment shuts things down much earlier than that. It convinces people that wanting something deeply is ~cringe~ unless success is guaranteed in advance, so instead they slowly redirect themselves toward paths that feel SAFER, more RESPECTABLE, EASIER to explain at dinner parties.

And to be clear, I’m not anti-pRactIcaLity. Please please please pay your rent. Please have health insurance. I’m not sitting here telling everyone to quit their jobs and move into a warehouse to make experimental films. But I do think something strange happens when people become so focused on employability that they lose touch with the things that naturally make them feel most ALIVE. Eventually you become incredibly good at consuming other people’s creativity while quietly suppressing your own. You know how to analyze films, recommend books, build taste, recognize great work, but making something yourself feels terrifying because creation requires REVEALING your inner world instead of safely reacting to everyone else’s.

And honestly, I still don’t know whether my writing is particularly good or whether there’s any logical reason someone should spend time reading my thoughts when there are infinitely smarter and more talented people in the world.

But I do know this: every single time I tried to become a more practical version of myself, writing kept finding its way back into my life anyway. And maybe the things we keep returning to, despite embarrassment, despite practicality, despite trying to optimize ourselves away from them, are trying to tell us something.