Have you ever realized that “adulting” has become a fancy word for getting really, really good at ignoring your own signals?
In this week’s Report from the Creative Closet, I’m exploring the eerie reality that we aren’t actually “lost”—we just forgot where we put ourselves. I’m sharing why that “force of will” you had as a five-year-old is the key to breaking free from the mask that is currently exhausting you.
In this episode, I discuss:
- The Pork BBQ Standoff: Why my five-year-old nephew’s legendary refusal to try barbecue is a masterclass in creative clarity.
- The Adulting Mask: The massive energy cost of spending your whole day saying “I should probably” while your intuition is saying “no”.
- Bad Snowflakes: How a simple, ridiculous drawing exercise can drop your persona and bring your energy back to life.
- The Creative Attic: Why you didn’t lose your spark; you just stuffed it into a box in the attic so you could “go along to get along.
Ready to send your inner critic to summer camp for an hour? We get together once a month for a relaxed, co-working-style session where you can work on whatever you want—without any pressure to do it “right.” Join the Creativity Circle.
We meet next on May 16.
Get in Touch
I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and experience with these ideas! Send me a note at fycuriosity.com, or contact me on Instagram, or Bluesky.
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Why You’re So Good at Ignoring Yourself | Reports from the Creative Closet #2
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:18]:
Welcome to this week’s Report from the Creative Closet. It’s not exactly glamorous, but it works.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:26]:
Last time I was talking about that feeling where everything looks fine and yet something is just not quite right. There’s something happening there that you might not have noticed. We say things all the time. Like I should probably,
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:45]:
I guess I have to, well, that’s just what you do. And yeah, you’re probably thinking that’s just normal. It’s just being an adult.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:55]:
And it sounds normal. But if you actually stop and listen to it for more than, oh, about three seconds, it starts to get a little weird. Because if you ask, do I actually wanna do this? And the answer is no.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:14]:
Most of us just keep going anyway.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:19]:
And I know you’re thinking, of course you do. You don’t always get a choice. That’s part of being an adult. I get it. I really do been there done that, but I’m not just talking about the occasional. I don’t feel like doing the laundry, taking the trash out, making dinner, driving the kids to soccer practice. Right. I’m talking about how often this happens
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:44]:
because it’s constantly and we act like that’s normal. It’s not
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:53]:
it’s common,
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:56]:
but it’s not natural. And, you know, people benefit when we stop listening to ourselves.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:05]:
That’s a bigger conversation that we’ll have next time,
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:08]:
but they do. And that’s not neutral.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:12]:
And the thing is we have trained ourselves not to
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:15]:
even notice it, much less react to it, which is really kinda eerie when you start to think about it. I mean, if you have ever been, again, around a small child,
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:34]:
And I’m gonna bet that just about everybody who’s watching or listening to this has at some point spent time around a small child. I’m gonna go ahead and bet that you have had this experience. But I am still gonna go ahead and frame it in terms of a particular incident that I recall with my nephew who is now 13, but at the time was maybe, I don’t know, five. When we were trying to get him to try some pork
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:06]:
barbecue. One bite,
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:09]:
just one. And if you have spent some time around a small child, you know what I’m going to tell you, which is that child wasn’t having it. He was not interested. There was not a chance in hell that boy was gonna open his mouth for even one tiny little smidgen of that pork barbecue. Not no way, not no how. It did not matter what we told him. We told him that he was gonna love it. We told him that it was sweet.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:39]:
We told him we told him that it was chicken because he liked chicken because of course we did. You know that story. If you’ve ever tried to do this, you tell the kid that it’s the thing that it’s not just to get him to open his mouth long enough to try it. Just, just to gain access in the hope that he will discover that he will like it. And he was not having it because, of course, he wasn’t because he was a kid and he was exercising his free will and his determination to say, uh-uh, no way, not know how. Not happening today. I think we must have spent at least a good half an hour trying to get that child to try that barbecue. Probably the logical
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:24]:
and likely more successful route would have been to say, okay, never mind.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:29]:
Can’t have it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:30]:
It’s not for you. Not today. Then he might’ve decided that he wanted it, but
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:37]:
that is not what we did. And and it was it was I would say it’s
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:42]:
a stalemate, but no. No. He won. He won
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:47]:
because he exercised his free will. He was not going to let us steamroll him at the age of five. Because kids have not learned
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:00]:
that they have to go along to get along yet. And if they have
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:05]:
at that age, it’s because something really, really bad has happened to them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:14]:
The thing is we were all that kid. I was that kid. You were that kid unless something bad happened to us.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:23]:
But in order for that bad thing to happen to us, it had to happen because we refused.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:28]:
We may not remember it, but we had that force of will
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:34]:
at that young age. We were very clear.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:37]:
We were very clear. We were very grounded in our no. And now we override that clarity all day long. And the thing is
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:49]:
much as I’m sitting here having to explain this to you, there is a part
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:53]:
of you that notices every single time. We notice, we feel it. There is very likely some part
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:04]:
of you that stiffens up and braces in some way
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:08]:
that your brain has trained itself not to notice because your brain has trained you to smile and go ahead and do the thing anyway and pretend that it’s all okay.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:25]:
So while it’s easy to say that you lost yourself,
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:30]:
it’s much more accurate to say that you got really, really good at ignoring yourself. And then eventually you just kind of forgot where you put yourself stuffed into a box in the attic somewhere. Now the bright side of this
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:47]:
is that I see the opposite happen with people all the time. I will go into workshops with folks and I will ask them
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:53]:
to do something ridiculous. For instance, back in January, to open a workshop because it was cold, I asked people to start
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:02]:
the workshop by drawing bad snowflakes. And I let people define bad snowflakes, whatever they whatever way they want. Could just be, I don’t know how to draw snowflakes. I’m waiting for the day when somebody draws, like, the gangster snowflakes. Hasn’t happened yet, but you never know. If you watch this and you
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:20]:
come to a workshop, maybe you’ll be the one. Now, most people, when they hear me say this, think, what the heck? Or this sounds ridiculous. Possibly even this sounds stupid. But I ask them to humor me. And when they humor me, inevitably, couple of things happen. They start to smile. They might start to giggle. They definitely end up with more energy
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:48]:
because they’re not having to pretend to be someone else anymore. Because the thing is, when you are wearing that mask all day, to be who somebody else thinks you need to be at home, at work, with your kids, with your boss, out in the outside world, wherever it is. That shit’s exhausting.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:15]:
It will take it right out of you. It requires a
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:20]:
lot of energy to keep that persona on you all day long.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:28]:
But when somebody tells you to draw a
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:29]:
bad snowflake, that whole thing comes down and you get to be whoever you want
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:36]:
to be. Whoever you really are in that moment is allowed to come out and play. And that is a phenomenally energizing experience. This is part of why people tell me that they’re too exhausted to
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:51]:
be creative. No, no, you you’ve got that backwards. You’ve got that backwards. And this is why doing something like making bad art is really helpful. Like we talked about last time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:01]:
It’s not because it’s important to make bad art, it’s because it lets you break loose of that persona and stop fighting yourself for a minute. And if you’re wondering how we got to be so good at ignoring ourselves like that,
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:16]:
it starts earlier than we think. And we’re gonna talk about that next time. But for now, just know you are allowed to notice what you actually feel, and what you actually think, and what you actually want in any given moment. Whether you’re allowed to
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:35]:
act on it or not, you are
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:36]:
allowed to notice. You might wanna start. Now if you decide that you would like to try coming and
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:46]:
making some bad art, making some good art, making whatever kind of art you want, hanging out in creative company, doing whatever you like for an hour with a bunch of other curiously creative people. Every month, I do that with the follow your curiosity creativity circle. We meet for an hour, usually on the fourth Saturday of the month with occasional exceptions. And it’s very, very low pressure. Everybody there is, is just there to do their own thing in whatever way calls to them. They are their own creative authority, and so are you. And we hang out with a little social time
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:24]:
in the middle, but otherwise, there are no rules. It’s up to
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:28]:
you to decide what you wanna do with that time. It could just be brainstorming. It could be getting some time in on a particular project. It could just be doodling for fun. It is totally up to you. It’s a a play and experiment and just see what happens in that hour. It’s really structure for you to use however you want it. We would love to have you.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:51]:
The link is either below this video or in the show notes, depending on how you are watching or listening to this. And I hope that you’ll join us sometime, because we have fun, and we would love to have you join us. So anyway, that is what I have for you from the Creative Closet this time. Thank you so much for joining me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:11]:
If you’re tired of thinking about answering a creative call but never actually doing it, come join me for an hour and start feeling like yourself again. The Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle is a safe, welcoming, and encouraging environment where we send the shoulds and inner critics off to summer camp where they’re kept busy rather than getting in our way. You can find it at the link in your podcast app. See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.