Have you ever looked at your life and realized that while everything is “okay” on paper, something is deeply off?
You aren’t alone, and I don’t think the problem is you. I think the problem is the invisible pressure we all feel to be “good enough” at everything we touch.
Welcome to the first Report from the Creative Closet—a new series of dispatches designed to help you move past the “shoulds” of adulthood and reconnect with your own aliveness. In this inaugural report, I share one of the weirdest but most effective ways I know to escape the perfectionism trap: making bad art on purpose.
In this episode, I discuss:
- The Falling Down Machines: Why we forget how to learn like toddlers—who fall on their faces and laugh rather than giving up.
- The 30-Day Experiment: What happened on Day 15 of my journey writing 30 “bad” poems for YouTube.
- Summer Camp for Critics: How to send your inner critic away on a scary ropes course so you are finally free to play.
- The Creative Authority: Why doing things “badly” is actually the fastest path back to your real self.
My Promise:I will never tell you that you need to force your way through resistance or ignore your intuition to follow a rigid self-help script. I’m here to provide a sanctuary, not another to-do list.
Ready to stop performing and start living? If this resonates, I invite you to join me for a free Creativity Circle. We get together once a month for a relaxed session where you can experiment without any pressure to do anything you don’t want to do.
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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Transcript: The Problem with Being Fine: Why “Okay” Isn’t Good Enough | Reports from the Creative Closet #1
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 [00:00:00]:
Welcome to this week’s report from the creative closet. It’s not exactly glamorous, but it does work. I wanna talk about something that feels really familiar to a lot of people. And it’s this feeling that everything in life seems to be pretty much okay. And I’m not talking about the overall global geopolitical situation, because we all know that that’s a dumpster fire right now, but everything in your little world, your little space on the planet seems to be okay on paper. And yet something isn’t quite right. And you can’t figure out what’s off. And it may look like everything’s okay.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:59]:
And yet I’m not quite happy or it should all be fine, but something’s missing. I think a lot of us are feeling this way, and, again, the global situation is not helping anything right now. But first of all, I wanna tell you, you’re not alone. This is super, super normal. But the second thing is, I don’t think it’s you. A lot of people in this situation default when they can’t find an external reason for what they’re feeling, conclude that it it must just be them, And I don’t think it’s you. I think the problem is the pressure to be good and to be good enough. And we all feel that from outside, even though we can’t necessarily put our finger on it and label that as where it’s coming from, because that pressure is kind of in the air around us.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:01]:
You know, we know it’s there, but we’re not necessarily conscious of it as an actual thing. So we don’t see it. One of the most effective, but also weirdest ways that I know to get out of that is to make bad art on purpose. And you may be thinking, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, hang on. How would that help? And also that sounds really, really strange. Right? And I get it. It’s very, very counterintuitive. But stay with me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:36]:
Let me explain. So I want you to think with me about everything you’ve ever learned in your life. This is something that as adults we don’t think about enough and really we we don’t remember learning a lot of things, but let’s be real. Nobody arrives on this planet knowing how to do very much. Right? We show up as babies and we know how to do maybe like four or five things. Right? We know how to sleep. We know how to swallow. We don’t even know how to chew yet because we don’t have teeth.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:14]:
We know how to poop. We’re very good at that. We know how to scream and we know how to giggle. That’s pretty much the list. Not a big list. Everything else we have to learn. We learn how to walk, we learn how to ride a bike, we learn how to spell and how to write it all, we learn how to do math, everything else we learn how to do and as little kids we are sponges, right? Our brains are made to learn everything because if we don’t we will not survive in this world. So, we absorb everything and it doesn’t feel like we’re absorbing everything because we’re little kids that’s what our brains are made to do.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:02]:
But I want you to think about the example of walking because none of us remember learning how to walk. We were too young. We we just we know how to do it. It’s second nature to us if we are fortunate enough to be able to walk as adults. But when we learned to walk, and we know this if we have ever watched a child walk, we fell flat on our faces all the time. We were little falling down machines when we learned how to walk. And if you watch a child learn how to walk, they they try to take a step, usually at the beginning holding on to somebody’s hand, and they fall or they trip because they’re still holding on to somebody’s hand. And what do they do? If they hurt themselves, they might cry, but usually they laugh.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:54]:
They pick themselves back up as well as they can because they’re still figuring this stuff out, and they try again. And they do this over and over and over and over until they finally figure it out. Most adults stop after the second or third time. We give up because we’ve decided that we’re not any good at this, we’re not gonna be any good at this, this isn’t for us, all of those things. But little kids don’t do that and there are two reasons why they don’t do that. The first reason is they have not learned to compare themselves to everybody else yet. Right? They are not standing there holding mom’s hand thinking, oh my god, I’m never gonna be as good at this walking thing as mom. She’s so good at it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:42]:
She does it without even thinking about it, and I am falling on my face. I’ve fallen 10 times already in the last five minutes. I’m doomed. I’m never gonna learn to walk. Right? You’ve never seen a little kid do that. Now there are some parents these days who would probably freak out and decide that their kid’s never gonna learn to walk, but the kid is not doing that because the kid desperately wants to learn to walk. They’re not comparing themselves and also that desperate desire to learn to walk, that’s the second reason. They want to learn that so badly and they are not giving up until they get there.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:23]:
So it’s those two things that propel that child to learn. It’s the same thing when kids learn to ride a bike, though by then they have learned that not everything is for them and to compare themselves to others, and it can be very hard to keep an older child on that bike long enough for them to master it. Because once they get the idea that they’re not gonna get there, it’s much harder. But every kid who wants to learn to walk, barring any kind of physical issue, learns to walk because they’re not doing those two things. And so we have that ability as adults, but we forget that that’s what it’s like to learn something, and we skip straight to, I tried a couple times, not for me. I’m putting down the ukulele. I’m not gonna do this. I I give up.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:19]:
I’m gonna go back to just, you know, doing my crossword puzzles, and that’s it. Now if we’ve tried the ukulele for six months and it’s just not happening, that might be fair. But after two or three times, it probably isn’t. And the net result is that we end up believing by the time we are probably in our teens, maybe a little bit older, that if we are not good at something right away, it’s not for us and we shouldn’t even try. Which means that we cut ourselves off from so many things that we might love and enjoy even if we never do them all that well because we never try them in the first place. Now if you’ve been following me for any length of time, you might know that this past October I did an experiment where I decided that I was gonna write 30 bad poems in thirty days and I put them up on YouTube. Now putting them up on YouTube made this a different experience for me than it might be for you, and bear that in mind. But it was a very interesting experience.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:26]:
Writing a bad poem is one of my favorite tools because almost anybody can do it. It’s very accessible. Everybody’s got a pen and a piece of paper, and we can all write badly. So I sat down with a regular composition book every day, and I wrote a bad poem. And I was just trying to do something that fit on that page, not necessarily fill it, definitely not go into a second page, keeping it very very simple. But I don’t necessarily do this every day. So every time I start playing with a bad poem for the first time in a while, I still have to go through the process of, wait, what is a bad poem again? How how do I how do I write badly again? Because we are so trained in that anything worth doing is worth doing well thing that, you know, that old chestnut that we all heard a million times as a child that installed this stupid critical voice in our heads, That it’s hard to say, wait, what, what happens without this? Who am I without this? That’s the first challenge. And it took me a couple of days to really get to the point where it was like, okay, right, bad poem, not, not good, don’t have to worry about any of that, just put words on the page.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:46]:
Because really that’s fundamentally what writing a bad poem is. And then I also would take the poem every day for YouTube. I would put the poem, take a picture, and put it up on the screen and also read it out loud and then talk about that poem. So much more scrutiny than you might have to do if you decide to do this for yourself. But after a couple of days it got to be much easier. It was also fun because people started adding their own bad poems to the comments. But what was really, really interesting was that around day 15, I realized that I no longer cared whether or not the poem was good. I was just ready to write a poem.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:30]:
So when you when you sit down and deliberately decide to do something badly, your inner critic has nothing to do with itself anymore. You’re basically sending it off to summer camp where it can go entertain itself on that ropes course that always scared the crap out of me as a child. And, you know, it’s out there doing its thing. You’re free to play and experiment and just have that freedom to write that bad poem that, you know, your seventh grade English teacher would have hated and just say, Yeah, guess what? I get to write that now. Or write something really silly, Write something that you always wanted to try, but were afraid to. Do whatever you want with that pad poem. You are your own creative authority. Nobody is standing there saying you have to do it this way.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:19]:
No, do it that way. What if you do it this way? Except you. And this is why doing it badly, doing any kind of creativity, but especially doing it badly, is, as I always say, the fastest path back to yourself. Because you are the one who’s in charge. It’s your voice. It’s your decision. You can decide that you want to experiment with this thing today. You can write something and say, oh, wait.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:48]:
I’m very curious about that. I wanna follow that further. You can say, oh, hang on. This reminds me of this other thing, and I’m gonna put this down for a minute, and I’m gonna go try this other thing, and maybe I’ll come back to this, and maybe I won’t, and that’s okay. You are the one in charge. It it reconnects you with parts of yourself that you may not have connected with for a long time or maybe even at all. I never knew that there was a podcasting part of myself until I actually started podcasting, just as one example. So you never know what will come up when you decide to experiment, and bad art is the ultimate experiment.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:29]:
And it’s really, really liberating because you can try so many things. And when you’re doing bad art and your inner critic is safely dangling from some rope on a tree somewhere, you never know what might come out. At least once, a friend of mine from my MFA program who saw one of these videos left a comment and said, no, no, not a bad poem, a good poem. Because the good art tends to sneak out when the inner critic isn’t there to get in its way saying, no, no, this isn’t quite good enough and you needed to do this part differently and this isn’t lined up the right way and and and and and and here are all the rules you should follow. That stuff gets in the way of all the things that really want to come out. This is why I love making bad art. This is why I find making bad art is a fundamentally incredibly liberating process for people who are willing to do the counterintuitive thing and give it a try. Now you may be saying, I would absolutely hate this.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:51]:
And maybe you feel like that would just be at first and maybe it would feel like it would be entirely. And that’s a fair reaction. It’s not easy to figure out how to do things badly at first. And it’s especially true. If you already have a history in a particular art form, it can be really, really hard to let go of that training Really hard. In which case, try doing it with something different. And you may be thinking that this would be really, really ridiculous because it would feel ridiculous to do it. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:27]:
Yeah. It’s hard. It’s hard. I’m not gonna lie to you. It feels really, really strange. But once you get over it, it’s really cool. It’s really cool to sit down and realize you don’t care whether you write a good poem or a bad poem. You just wanna see what’s gonna come out today and be surprised by it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:49]:
And then you have something to work with, you can see what you can turn it into. Maybe it wants to be something more, maybe it’s just an interesting exercise for the day. You can decide after you see what it is. And you are under no obligation ever to show it to anyone. You know? I mean, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Come on. I am sitting here talking to you from my closet. Do you really think I’m going to lecture you about having to do things perfectly? I am in no position to do that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:21]:
And, and I have no right to do that anyway, even if I were coming to you from a a studio, nobody has any right to tell you that you have to hand over your work to for anybody else to see. Nobody does. That’s always up to you. You are your own creative authority. It’s always your decision. Always. Don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise, including me. So when you actually give this a try, should you choose to accept this mission, you’ll find that your inner critic gets quieter even when you haven’t explicitly sent it off to, you know, do acrobatics at summer camp.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:59]:
Your curiosity comes back. Ideas will come to you much more easily and freely, and you’ll start to feel more like yourself. You may even be surprised at what that feels like if it’s been a long time since you’ve actually let yourself play and do any kind of creative activity at all. Because we switch that stuff off at a young age. It could be a long time. So it could be really, really interesting for you, maybe a little bit scary, but also kind of fun to see what’s what’s lurking under there that you lost touch with. Those parts of you that loved to play with things a long time ago that were lit up by playing with clay or by singing and dancing along with the radio when you were a five year old kid. Whatever it is, it’s a great way to reconnect with those parts of yourself that are still there, that still wanna play.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:13]:
And you may realize that you missed that version of yourself and that it really feels kinda nice. But, you know, it’s always up to you, what you decide to do with anything that I suggest here. You are your own creative authority. Your call. If you decide that you want to try any of this and that you’d like to do it with company, I have the follow your curiosity creativity circle. Every month, we just get together and it’s very, very low pressure. Everybody in that circle understands this way of thinking about creativity. And we would love to have you for a really, really relaxed session where you get to play and experiment and not have any pressure to do anything you don’t wanna do for an entire hour.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:05]:
That link is in the description or the show notes depending on where you’re listening to this, And you’re always welcome. In any case, that is what I have for you from The Creative Closet this week. Thank you so much for joining me.